Keiko Amano's Blog
RSS
Nov.11.2008
On Oct. 1st, I stopped by at the Keikyu Department Store at Kamioooka Station. I was on the way to my mother's grave. At the information booth, I found a pile of application forms for a letter contest. I wrote one and dropped it in the mail box provided. Then a few weeks ago, I won their award...
Continue Reading »
Nov.10.2008
The photo is my grandmother, my mother’s mother. It was probably taken around 1918 in Takasaki. I know the address. I made a visit there a few times when I was very young. I went into the last remaining okura, an old-style, thick walled storage structure, where the family used to keep silk. ...
Continue Reading »
4 comments
Oct.27.2008
On Oct. 27th, I made a visit to the sixtieth Yokohama Kadou (flower arrangement) exhibit that was held on the 8th floor of Takashima-Ya Department Store near Yokohama Station. Today, the Yokohama Kadou Association has more than two thousand members from 97 Kadou schools. 80 years ago, only about...
Continue Reading »
2 comments
Oct.23.2008
In 1962, A boy clalssmate with beautiful skin let me read his “Shonen Magazine” and “Shonen Sunday.” He sat close to the blackboard with his friend, and I sat at the back of the room. Since then, the Manga culture grew and blossomed out of those weekly magazines. I stopped reading Manga after...
Continue Reading »
Oct.10.2008
The word ban connects to guard, and guard connects to vanguard. Since the Mongols had advanced army and early contact with the west, I thought the word originated from them. And many languages like Spanish and Japanese have no v sound, so the people originally created and used the word vanguard...
Continue Reading »
Oct.01.2008
I made a visit to my mother yesterday. The photo is the road to where she rests. She died on October 1st, 1996. My image of that day is a tall building with vertical banners hanging from the top.
That evening, I was talking with one of her ocha students on phone. I heard beeps in the middle...
Continue Reading »
Oct.01.2008
I don’t know how to pronounce 幡 in Chinese, but in Japanese, ban is closest. Ban is a strip of silk cloth hung from a wooden pole in temples to honor Buddha. I think this millennium old tradition is related to scroll making. I love good scrolls with good frames, so I am interested also in bans...
Continue Reading »
Sep.28.2008
Marco Polo didn’t travel to Japan, so he described the country in “The Travels of Marco Polo” from what he heard. His description was that Japan had gold, and Japanese had the habits of cleaning. Gold was gone long ago, but the cleansing culture shows up in the rituals and arts.
When I read a...
Continue Reading »
Sep.25.2008
From Oct. 3rd to 7th, a play "Exchanged Letters" written by Jean Paul Alegre, directed by Masako Okada will be performed at the Sotetsu Honda Gekijou. The theater is close to the west exit of the Yokohama station.
Masako Okada studied acting under Bella Reine (1897 - 1983) in Paris. ...
Continue Reading »
Sep.24.2008
Bi-monthly, the Beatles’ fans gather at Kazuyuki Komuro’s voice training class at Yomiuri Cultural Center in Sogo Department Store. The Sogo is at the east exit of the Yokohama station.
We sing one of the Beatles’ songs to Komuro-Sensei’s piano. And the third meeting, he helps produce our...
Continue Reading »
Sep.24.2008
Honcho and Kowtow
I went to work for Farmers Insurance Group in Los Angeles in 1983 as a systems-programmer trainee. At first, I was making a Job File Control Block program in Assembler language which communicated and controlled batch jobs in two data centers. Tom was my immediate boss then,...
Continue Reading »
Sep.22.2008
About three weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised to see one of my sentences when I searched ‘Yesterday’ and my name in Google. The sentence was ‘In the corner of the room, the kettle sat on a bronze stove. The Korean-style stove hid the mound of ashes and coal. I couldn’t read her mood.’ The...
Continue Reading »
Sep.20.2008
In '60s, a television program titled “The Seven Grand Kids” was popular in Japan. The drama was based on Genji Keita's novel with the same title. But I liked “Lucy’s Show” or “The Fugitive” more then.
The other day, I saw his book, “A Company-President’s Daughter” on a rack of free used books...
Continue Reading »
Sep.19.2008
A few years ago, I translated a part of `Cats` Moving’ by Jiro Osaragi and sent it to friends. The article was written in 1958 for the Oosaka Newspaper. He was a member of the writers who started Bonbori Festival in Kamakura to boost Japan’s culture that was sluggish because of WWII. I hope you...
Continue Reading »
Sep.16.2008
I went back to see the sign this morning and examined it.
It is a propaganda sign of Komei Party. The line at the bottom says it is for newly-weds and child-bearing generation and so on. The message is written in a run-on sentence. It contains “tari” that is usually used in a parallel...
Continue Reading »
About Keiko
Keiko Amano is a bilingual and bicultural writer who lives in Los Angeles and Yokohama. She writes short stories and novels in English and Japanese. Her stories appeared in Eye-Ai magazine.
Connections
Keiko’s Favorite Books
All the books by Flannery O'Connor
Keiko is a fan of
