(The picture accompanying this blog is of one of my vegetable “cages”. I cultivate vegetables inside a cage in order to discourage animal...

Photo courtesy of Ulena Switucha, circa 2009 (Happy Spring, everyone! Please check out the new photos on the website. I have now been...

Happy Spring Equinox! (for northern hemisphere dwellers) Two years ago this month, my son’s family, with Covid snapping at their heels,...

(The picture is an illustration from my children’s book My Awesome Japan Adventure (Tuttle 2013), showing women in kimono sitting in the...

Hello friends, please forgive me for not writing in a while. Late winter is really hard for me to get through, so I have scheduled a lot...

Happy New Year 2022 to everyone who reads this blog, and to your families and loved ones. Please excuse the long silence. I have been a...

I started out to write an article about online anger. How I feel when I “weigh in” to arguments on social media; I stay away from...

By Julia Otowa and Rebecca Otowa Ok, so some of you may have been thinking, “How are those two cats, Boris and Daisy doing?” Well, I’m...

Our family temple is about 300 years old, and is famous for its garden of (azalea). When I first came to live here in the 1980s, it was...

Should I put “trigger warnings” on this blog post? Would people be triggered by my mentioning insults, suffering, disturbing images,...

The other evening I was out for a walk and noticed, walking west, that the sun was about to set. A few minutes later I watched as the...

"Broken Tile", original painting by Rebecca Otowa 2021 I’ve been thinking a lot about COVID and coercion lately. By this I mean, how the...

I am sitting at the front window of my living room, which opens onto the front yard, and it’s raining a bit. This is the wettest August...

Feelings always run high for me at the two big holiday seasons of the Japanese year, O-Bon (August) and O-Shogatsu (New Year). Perhaps...

Hello from summery Otowa! Please check out the summer pictures now up on the website. Here is a blog written by my grandchildren about...

Identity is a funny thing. When you are young, you don’t have much idea of it, and in the first part of your life a lot of energy is...

(A correction to the last blog – awa is not a nut like chestnut, but a type of millet. Excuse the error.) I don’t remember when it was...

Many places in Japan are regarded as romantic. One such place is the Gokayama Gassho villages in Toyama Prefecture, and the related...

I’ve been thinking about the difference between loneliness and aloneness. I vacillate between the two – ironically, I often feel more...

Spring festival procession, involving half the town, hundreds of years old – canceled for the first time since large-scale roadworks...