Lafcadio in Japan Code – Seeking A Lost Spiritual Tradition Commemorative Exhibition Catalog Released 日本の文化

Japanese philosophy, mythology and art lovers alike will fall in love with a unique new e-book Lafcadio in Japan Code – Seeking A Lost Spiritual Tradition. This Exhibition Catalog, serving as a memory book of the April 22-25 Kyoto exhibition that commemorated the 170th anniversary of Lafcadio Hearn’s birth, contains a plethora of art, photography, poetry and prose about Japanese culture from collaborators the world over.

Exhibition Organizer and Japan Code Publisher, Masashi Nakamura of the Research Center for Japanese Culture Structural Studies 日本文化構造学研究会, passionately spear-headed the collective event and e-book that celebrates Hearn, a 19th-Century Greek-Anglo-Irishman whose influential writings about Japan have become classics.

A global collaboration of artists is at the heart of the effort, emphasizing Japanese culture’s reverence for nature and mutual dependence on each other as a guide for the world to achieve peace and harmony so desperately needed in this tumultuous era.

Yamabushi ceremony at Hougonji Mountain Temple photo by Everett Kennedy Brown.

This e-book is a pure work of art for many reasons. Nakamura translated Greek Artist and Poet Maria Papatzelous’s haiku and free verse into ancient Japanese and peppered the book with Japanese myth and philosophy in his charming and informative English that includes Kanji for Japanese language lovers. Ms. Papatzelous’s first collaborative e-book with Nakamura, The Liquid Sky: Where Art, Haiku and Japanese Myth Connect, collects her artwork that was displayed in conjunction with the exhibition and as visuals for Nakamura’s text on Japanese myth and philosophy.

The e-book’s hearty contents include American Artist Rona Conti‘s Shodo and art, as well as other global artists’ photography, Sumi-ink and calligraphy, storytelling, performance and book donations. It also contains poets’ winning Haiku that Romanian Artist Ion Codrescu judged and made into Haiga, including my second place Haiku and more.

Exhibition photos of Maria Papatzelou’s kimonos by Everett Kennedy Brown.

Venture Culturalist Everett Kennedy Brown’s stunning photographs of kimonos and rituals of Yamabushi alike, fill the 282-page e-book. Brown wrote the preface as well, which, among many things, discusses the popularity of Japanese culture and Zen with the West.

Haiga by Romanian Artist and Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Haiku Competition Judge Ion Codrescu of Second place winner Sydney Solis’s haiku.

Lafcadio Hearn portended this in his 1894 book, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan,a return to having a relationship with the natural world. He writes:

“For Western civilization has invaded all this primitive peace, with its webs of steel, with its ways of iron… Yet to that past which her younger generation now affect to despise Japan will certainly one day look back, even as we ourselves look back to the old Greek civilization.

Commemorative film of the Lafcadio Hearn Exhibition in Kyoto.

She will learn to regret the forgotten capacity for simple pleasures, the lost sense of the pure joy of life, the old loving divine intimacy with nature, the marvelous dead art which reflected it. She will remember how much more luminous and beautiful the world then seemed. She will mourn for many things – the old fashioned patience and self-sacrifice, the ancient courtesy, the deep human poetry of the ancient faith. She will wonder at many things; but she will regret.”

Japanese traditional culture and spirit of collaboration that focuses on a peaceful renaissance for humanity is a bright light emerging from a dark cave, heralding in a new era of beautiful harmony. This pioneering e-book Lafcadio in Japan Code – Seeking A Lost Spiritual Tradition lights the way!

Omedeto! おめでとう

Where to purchase —

Lafcadio in Japan Code – Seeking A Lost Spiritual Tradition is available for 1000 Yen at The Book Pit, which accepts 134 different currencies.

To view a sample of the e-book, click here.

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