A Noh play and temple chronicle, thought to have prehistoric origins in one of the oldest professions, was translated for the Shikoku Bilingual Guidebook by Akiko Takemoto and Steve McCarty. The co-author narrates this podcast, telling the heart-wrenching story of a woman’s ultimate sacrifice, with an overlay of Buddhism and archetypal symbolism.…[Read more]

A gripping legend about the origin of the Pilgrimage of Shikoku seems to prove reincarnation. This five-minute podcast recounts the miracle story, then poses discussion questions that could, and have been, used educationally with groups to get at the underlying motive and purpose of the legend.

A series of derivative verses from the late-third century has pride of place in one of the foundational collections of Chinese poetry. These verses, “Filling out the Missing Odes” by Shu Xi, can be found at the beginning of the lyric-poetry (shi 詩) section of the Wenxuan. This essay seeks to understand why such blatantly imitative pieces may have…[Read more]

A series of derivative verses from the late-third century has pride of place in one of the foundational collections of Chinese poetry. These verses, “Filling out the Missing Odes” by Shu Xi, can be found at the beginning of the lyric-poetry (shi 詩) section of the Wenxuan. This essay seeks to understand why such blatantly imitative pieces may have…[Read more]

Asian directors leverage Shakespeare’s own propensity to undermine dominant ideologies of gender—notably through the Ophelia figure—in their effort to renew Asian performance traditions. How do Shakespeare and modern directors talk to each other across cultural and historical divides? How does Ophelia become “unbound” through supraling…[Read more]

Two papers on the Jungian psychology of Asian religions from M.A. coursework at the University of Hawaii in 1978. “Equations of Freedom with Enlightenment” analyzes Chinese Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen as to the meaning of liberation. Then “This World as a Symbolic Body of the Buddha” analyzes the Shingon Buddhist cosmology of Kukai and its Tantric…[Read more]

Hashikuradera, the inner sanctuary of Kompira-san on Shikoku island, defied the Meiji government and has kept Buddhism and Shinto on the same hallway to this day. This old map depicts the syncretic divinity Kompira Daigongen whirling through the air from Kompira-san or Elephant’s Head Mountain (upper left) to meet Kukai, just labeled the great…[Read more]

A multilingual podcast, recorded in August 2005 by native speakers of English, Japanese, and Chinese, found proverbs with a similar meaning in each culture. The author arranged this podcast during a Translation class between Japanese and English with fourth year students at Shinonome University in Matsuyama, on Shikoku island in Western Japan.

On 12 July 1776, Captain James Cook and his crew left England in search of the famed
Northwest Passage. Spanish, French, and Russian explorers before him had set out to
find this Arctic waterway, which was thought to link the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans
and promised to open up a new, more direct trading route with Asia. After seven
months…[Read more]

Introduction to “Digital Methods and Traditional Chinese Literary Studies,” a special issue of the Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture.

This article combines qualitative and quantitative methods to rethink the literary history of late medieval China (830–960 CE). It begins with an overview of exchange poetry in the Tang dynasty and its role in the construction of the poetic subject, namely, the poetic subject’s distributed textual body. A total of 10,869 poems exchanged between 2…[Read more]

My Ph.D. examination bibliography in the fields of Contemporary Southern Literature and Contemporary Book History and Print Culture

Black artists have created, modified, or otherwise treated the book as an object of aesthetic expression since at least the nineteenth century. African American artists’ production and circulation of friendship albums and scrapbooks, democratic multiples and artist publishing, accordion folds, enclosures, and fine printing editions, all work to…[Read more]