"Daytime" Daisuke
He was known around the night clubs of Ginza area of Tokyo as Daytime Daisuke and his sight was set at a shot at the big league, up there...
The Tortilla Incident: In the Footsteps of Bethune
In the first week at the Osztrovics tobacco farm in southwestern Ontario, I froze the Mexican’s leftovers. The tortillas were iced up...
When Jobim Sang Off Key in Japan
You sit in your seat at the Hibiya Concert Hall, an outside venue in the style of a Roman amphitheater with its rows of seats that curve...
Book Review: The Periodic Table
To some memoirists, a photo or a song may open memory’s flood gates, but for Primo Levi, a chemist by trade, it is the elements that...
Red Tape Blues
Getting kicked out of Japan is no fun. Really, take my word for it. I am strolling into one of those grayish, nondescript government...
An Audience with the Shogun
After months of planning and traveling from the Dutch colony of Deshima to Edo, the capital of Japan, or Dai Nippon (Great Kingdom of the...
The Fisherman and the Sea Creature
With heavy taxes due to the Shogun to support the upper classes, the peasants were often strapped for money to feed their own families...
The “Unhappy Man” Francis Heron
It was a cold miserable January month in 1834 at Fort Nisqually. Francis Heron, a Chief Trader for Hudson’s Bay Company and manager at...
The Village at Fort Vancouver: A Multicultural Experiment
When the Japanese castaways arrived at Fort Vancouver in the summer of 1834, they encountered the settlement at the fort, one of the...
Book Review: The Sea Was In Their Blood
To outsiders eating their lobster suppers in New Glasgow or fish and chips on the patio at North Rustico Harbour with decor of lobster...
