the qualia journal

I was in the car on the way to the conference site in Saga . We have just been to the old Saga castle site. As we left the Saga Castle Hist...

"El Sur" by the Spanish director Victor Erice is one of my all-time favorite films. In it, el sur ("the south") is depic...

Some days ago, I went to the Nasu district, where the Nasu Imperial Villa is located. It is a favorite summer retreat for the Japanese, as d...

Boybu (wind wall) is a typical Japanese style of art, and many excellent specimens are known. Of them, the Jitsugetsu Sansui-zu Byobu (...

When I was 16, the senior high school teacher gave us a booklet titled "Background to Britain". We were to read it during the summ...

Several days I go, I made a comment on the internet service twitter. Since then, some people have told me their opinions about twitter, as I...

I chatted with my best friend　 Takashi Ikegami in the Omotesando area in Tokyo. The dialogue was held for the philosophy and poetry magazin...

The human bran is attracted to contingencies, the mixture of regular and random things. Contingencies are concerned with the border between ...

One of the apparent functions of the perception of one's will is to make one's own action predictable by the self. By the cognition ...

As I have repeatedly written in this space, I used to collect and study butterflies quite seriously when I was a kid. It meant that I had to...

Civilizations come in many forms. I traveled to the Island of Bali in February. On the last evening of my stay, there was a Legong dance sho...

I have been keeping the Japanese blog more or less regularly since 12 December, 1999. My webpage The Qualia Manifesto was initiated on 26...

I was traveling to Nara , the ancient capital of Japan. After searching for huge cedar trees in the mountain, I was strolling in the town ce...

"The Lamentations of a Mermaid" (Ningyo no nageki) is a literary bar ("Bundan" bar) in Tokyo. You can meet writers, nove...

When I was a kid, I really loved to eat watermelons. I would sometimes eat them graciously with a spoon, with all the grace that a boy child...

In the great masterpiece by Soseki Natsume , Sanshiro , there is a humorous passage between Yojiro and Sanshiro, two University students. --...

Ever since I learned that there was going to be a total solar eclipse in the southern islands of Japan I wanted to be there. However, these ...

When I was a kid I used to be a bookworm. When I am really absorbed in reading, I become one with the book. On one memorable afternoon, I re...

I went to the performance of "Hansel and Gretel" of Seiji Ozawa Ongakujuku 2009. The first time I heard live music under Seiji Oza...

In the small house that I rented in Cambridge, there was an old wooden chair. I used to sit on them in the evening, sipping beer and watchin...