Born and raised in Los Angeles, Leanne Ogasawara studied philosophy with the great Hubert Dreyfus at U.C Berkeley and Japanese Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Where has the time gone? She spent most of the past twenty years in Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan where she worked as a freelance Japanese translator and sometimes writer and student of Tea. Now, back in LA, she still loves traveling –though mostly in her imagination via books, art and music. Her creative writing has appeared in the Millions, Michigan Quarterly Review, Kyoto Journal, River Teeth/Beautiful Things, Hedgehog Review, Entropy, the Dublin Review of Books, aPleiades Magazine and Gulf Coast Journal. Her short “Bare Bones” was the winner of the 2020 Calvino Prize, judged by Joyce Carol Oates. > Email: leanneogasawara [at] icloud.edu
Website: http://www.leanneogasawara.com
by Leanne Ogasawara From Xia to Shang And from Shang to Zhou…. You know the story: Nine bronze tripods– cast back in the mists of great antiquity– were treasured by ancient Chinese Kings as a symbol of their right to rule. Passed down from dynasty to dynasty– for nearly 2,000 years (or so the story…
by Leanne Ogasawara My old friend C. laments the way “play” is diminished in the West. He says: Western culture belittles play since it represents something very powerful to be controlled. Play represents quite fully: a journey, education, exploration to discover our full nature. To live is to play… and as a adult “play” is…
by Leanne Ogasawara In the wake of the bombings in Boston, Katie Roiphe's post at slate caught my attention. She says: Those obsessively poring over emerging news about the Boston bombers should take a break from their iPhones and laptops and newspapers and read Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, (and see Mira Nair’s film version…
by Leanne Ogasawara “If God allowed you to go back in time to spend the day with one famous historical person, who would you choose?” He pondered this question in a rose garden. And as he happily ran through his various candidates– “Plato or Socrates in downtown Athens; or how about Nietzsche or the young…
by Leanne Ogasawara Last month here, my illustrious 3QD associate Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash) asked the following question: Can America survive what our 1% and their useful idiots and the dems have done to us? His answer, in short, is no. He says: We used to be a Ford economy: at the outset Ford…
by Leanne Ogasawara Cities are smells, said the great Mahmoud Darwish: Acre is the smell of iodine and spices. Haifa is the smell of pine and wrinkled sheets. Moscow is the smell of vodka on ice. Cairo is the smell of mango and ginger. Beirut is the smell of the sun, sea, smoke, and lemons.…
by Leanne Ogasawara Talking about sacred music the other day, the Rabbi quite unexpectedly said, the name Bethlehem means the “house of bread,” or “the house of lambs for sacrifice.” Just think about *that* for a minute. Sacrifice. Whether understood in the traditional ritual do ut des terms familiar throughout much of Asia; or in…
by Leanne Ogasawara There was recently mention in the media of a religious extremist in Egypt calling for the destruction of the pyramids. I first heard talk of this last summer– around the time that the shrines in Timbuktu were destroyed. Holy hoax or not, I could not help but think of Bamiyan. I can…
by Leanne Ogasawara The other day on Facebook, I posted an article from the Atlantic, A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths. In the wake of Aurora, I thought there was a lot that was of interest in the article. But almost immediately the first comment I got was the old…