the qualia journal

I was having a conversation with my best friend Masahiko Shimada at a public lecture in Tokyo. Masahiko is a famous writer. Masahiko opened ...

On the airplane, I was thinking again about Glenn Gould. In an earlier post ( "Private language of music", 14th October 2009 ), I ...

I was walking to NHK, and going through the Yoyogi park. Near the entrance, there is a shop where they sell beer, drinks, and miscellaneous ...

It was late, as I finally made my way towards home. I was alone in the street, with the hush of night surrounding my existence. As often hap...

In life what you see in the periphery is often more important than what you observe in the central vision. If your attention is stuck, then ...

One of the things I am quite sure is that when I have spare time I know how to spend it. Without money, left alone from the world at large, ...

As a kid I used to dream of starry apparitions. I would be lying on the ground looking up at the night sky. While observing the twinkling st...

From yesterday's twitter entry. kenmogi Have become the world's fastest leopard. 7C of the 9th in Shinkansen heading for Kyoto. Corr...

I usually take a morning stroll to a convenience store nearby, and pick up some morning goods. For the last couple of days, I have walked on...

At the end of another busy day, I went to Kazahana in the Shinjuku district. Kazahana is a legendary literary bar. "Kazahana" (...

I love the film in which Glenn Gould plays the Goldberg Variations. What a beautiful procession! Aria, 30 variations, and then aria again. A...

I love autumn when the sky is blue and high. My best stroll would be along a river bank, where the autumn flowers display their miscellaneou...

"De Profundis" is a work in the form of a letter that Oscar Wilde wrote during his time in prison. In it, there is this beautiful ...

It is a remarkable aspect of human cognition that when something passes, it remains unnoticed for a long time. We recognize the golden time ...

The decision of the Nobel committee to award Mr. Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize was laudable. Some people might say that it has been pre...

When I was a kid, I found it really difficult to swallow the pills. It was not that the pills were particularly large. These were ordinary p...

Without even knowing it, one becomes a prisoner of one's own prejudices, I thought. I was in a Tokyo bar as the typhoon number 18 approa...

I went to the Superdeluxe club in the Roppongi district of Tokyo. I was late, having finished my work for a broadcaster at 22 hours. As I ar...

The return of Soseki Natsume from the two years' stay in London, in retrospect, was a watershed in the cultural history of modern Japan....

It is often said that the stream of consciousness was discovered by the great American psychologist William James. Needless to say, the stre...