Konnichiwa from Japan! 🇯🇵
Konnichiwa from Japan! 🇯🇵
What I've been drawing, reading, and watching
Hi from Tokyo, Japan. Since I last wrote, we’ve been to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea, and now we’re working our way through Japan until we fly home in early August. I want to catch you up with what I’m working on and offer a couple Japanese culture recommendations.
100 Days + Drawings
My most recent project has been drawing and posting a sketch to Instagram every day as a kind of visual journal of our trip.
The same day I sent the last newsletter, I saw a tiny, gridded memo pad for sale in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. The notebook had 100 pages and I realized we had about 100 days left in our trip, and I immediately decided to fill it up.
I set some rules for myself: Every drawing is straight to pen, but whiteout is allowed. I must do this every day, even if I’m not happy with it. To keep things interesting, every nine drawings I mix it up and change the color or style so that when you scroll through my Instagram, you see these cohesive blocks. Anything is fair game as a subject, and often it’s a little moment and not even the “big tourist attraction” of the day.
Some are loose and fun, others are stiff and too wrong for whiteout. But there are happy accidents and ones that I like a lot.
Occasionally stuff happens that’s too good to pass up, or the color I’m working with is perfect for something I see, and I am pretty much compelled to draw it.
Anyway, I’ve found a pretty good groove and have about a month to go, so please feel free to peruse what I’ve drawn and follow along over on Insta.
Three Old Japanese Culture Recs
Yeah, sure, maybe you grew up on anime and read every new Murakami. But the land of the rising sun is a cultural behemoth that always has more to watch or read. I’ve got three absolutely unimpeachable gems for you, in three different mediums. They are each both a fun time and say a lot about Japanese culture, art, and history.
Oishinbo
My friend Zach turned me on the amazing, long-running manga series Oishinbo by writer Tetsu Kariya and artist Akira Hanasaki. One of the best things about manga is that there’s truly something for everyone. As opposed to being dominated by one narrow genre, such as superhero stories, Japanese comics cover subjects as diverse as baseball and bathhouses.
Oishinbo, a series about journalists setting out to chronicle the best Japanese food in their “ultimate menu,” was very popular for over two decades. This manga will teach you, if you let it, everything from how to pick a sake to the perfect mix-ins for a bowl of rice. English translations are available through the publisher VIZ, who has a new manga app where you can read a ton of Oishinbo with a monthly subscription of just $2.
The Curious Casebook of Inspector Hasnhichi: Detective Stories of Old Edo
Really all I should say here is: samurai detective stories. I just finished this absolutely ripping collection of stories written by Japanese playwright and novelist Kido Okamoto in the 1930s. These stories, very much in the style of Sherlock Holmes, are set in the fascinating era right after Japan was “closed” to the West for 250 years. The translation by Ian MacDonald is so lively that these stories read effortlessly and are so entertaining. Truly, I do not know why this book isn’t everywhere, it’s fantastic.
Stray Dog
You heard of this filmmaker Akira Kurosawa? Yeah, me too. I mostly know his samurai epics like Seven Samurai and Rashomon. But he also directed contemporary movies, including noir detective bangers like Stray Dog from 1949. It has a very good, simple premise: a cop is pickpocketed on the tram and loses his pistol. Everything unspools from there. Just a few years after WWII, Japan is rebuilding itself but is still very much a mess.
Typical of Kurosawa, there are some amazingly composed shots, great movement through the frame, and weather is employed as a powerful storytelling tool. Also, Toshiro Mafune, who would go on to star in many of those samurai movies, is a 29-year-old smokeshow here. Yes, it’s in Japanese, and black and white, but it will grab you. It moves like a modern movie and has a great plot. You can watch it (currently free) on YouTube.
That’s all for now. Next time I write, I’ll likely be back in the US, sweating it out in D.C.’s humid August weather. Thanks for reading.
If you have any questions about traveling for a year in Asia, please send them my way or leave a comment. I may answer them in a future newsletter.
—Josh