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 For years now, I have been dreaming this dream that our national park rangers would rise up and lead a coup. Whenever I used to return to the US from Japan or Hong Kong -it was always so appalling flying into LAX (a truly banana republic experience), our infrastructure seemed as shabby…
by Leanne Ogasawara About five hundred miles north of Saigon lies Vietnam's old imperial capital city of Hue. Famous for its walled palace set along the shimmering Perfume River, it stands as a 19th century Vietnamese emperor's imperial dream of China. In days past, the beautiful palace moat was filled with tall, fragrant lotus blossoms.…
by Leanne Ogasawara Two months ago, I wrote a post in these pages called The Romance of the Red Dictionaries. It was about the possibility of romance without a shared language; that language can make things more complicated and, well, less, fun and romantic! In my case at least, things went downhill fast the more…
by Leanne Ogasawara Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness. —Italo Calvino Just a short walk down the portico-covered arcades of Via Roma leads to one of the most elegant Baroque squares in Turin– if not, in all…
. by Leanne Ogasawara On the day of the second presidential debate, my mom and I decided that it would be just too lewd for my son to watch. I suppose I should mention my son is 14! Never in my life, have I seen anything like the insane circus that is surrounding this presidential…
by Leanne Ogasawara We were so young back then. Maybe that's why the absence of a shared language never seemed to slow us down much. Arriving in Tokyo on Easter Sunday 1991, I was a recent college graduate and spoke no Japanese at all. And Tetsuya spoke not a word of English. In those days…
by Leanne Ogasawara The other night, I was dancing with the Dalai Lama. We were in a large auditorium that looked like a high school gym– and in front of a packed audience sitting in the bleachers, we danced, just the two of us–cheek to cheek. I am not actually such a huge fan of…
by Leanne Ogasawara Pinochet. Chavez. Trump? After decades of suffering under populist autocrats, Latin Americans have a message for the Gringos: Welcome to our world. So begins a great article in Politico by Ben Wofford. So many times over the past several years, I have wondered how America managed to turn into a bonafide banana…
by Leanne Ogasawara When it comes to private art collections, not many places have the richness and diversity of Italy. Of course, Italy also has a few great national museums too. But that is not where one usually heads to find the cream of the crop of the country's fine art. For in Italy, the…
by Leanne Ogasawara I was recently reading a book by the dreadful Robert Kaplan on the topic of China and the South China Sea, in which the author suggested that Chinese culture exists in one of its purest forms in Malaysia. He argued that only in the overseas Chinese communities that have continuously existed scattered…
by Leanne Ogasawara Madonna del Parto Last summer, marooned with a large group of astronomers in a remote 11th century abbey in the Tuscan countryside, I found myself growing increasingly antsy. Hatching a plan to break out, I dragged my astronomer off on what should have been one of the great pilgrimages of our lifetime–for…
by Leanne Ogasawara “Italian Criminal Masterminds Heisted $875,000 Worth of Parmesan” “Only in Italy,” I thought a few months ago when I read the headline above. Of course, Italian cheeses, like French wines, have been highly valued and given as gifts of diplomacy to kings and queens since at least the Medieval period. Samuel Pepys…
by Leanne Ogasawara Last week, I finally got to meet one of my heroes, Kip Thorne. I was a real cosmology geek when I was young have been a fan of his since early junior high school. So when my astronomer offered to introduce me during a Caltech event to celebrate the Ligo discovery, I…
by Leanne Ogasawara “When I was an undergraduate, on my way to first day of quantum mechanics class, I was riding up in the elevator with the professor and several (male) students. The professor kindly informed us that this would be the class that “separated the men from the boys.” Astronomy is really making the…
by Leanne Ogasawara Have you ever been moved to tears by a painting? There is a wonderful letter, in James Elkins' Pictures and Tears, about museum goers looking at a landscape painting in Japan. The lady who wrote the letter to Elkins was in Tokyo as part of an Andy Warhol exhibition. Unable to speak…
by Leanne Ogasawara Once upon a time, asymmetrical warfare was viewed as a last resort. Only when every other means possible had been exploited and defeat seemed inevitable, only then would people make a stand against an obviously far stronger enemy. Thermopylae comes to mind. Between cliffs and the sea, it was here that Leonidas…
by Leanne Ogasawara The history of the Japanese calendar stretches very far back into Japanese history- so far back, indeed, that we find ourselves in ancient China. As was true of many facets of the ancient Chinese civilization–from its writing system to ceramics and medicine– the Chinese calendar was remarkably advanced and far superior to…
By, Leanne Ogasawara It is one of my life regrets that when in Delhi, I did not take the time to go down and see the Taj Mahal. This is not even the worst travel regret I have either. But it is the second worst. There was so much to see and do in Delhi…
by Leanne Ogasawara Not far from Amman, located just outside the city of Salt is the shrine of the Old Testament Prophet Joshua. It is a simple building containing nothing but a tomb. But what a tomb it is; for at about ten meters long, it makes quite an impression! Indeed, ever since visiting the…
by Leanne Ogasawara I can't recall now where I originally found this, but several years ago I stumbled on an interesting Japanese translation for the words shalom and salaam. 1) 平和 (対国、対神、対人) ・・・和平、和解 Peace (no conflict; no fighting) 2) 平安 (個人的)・・・平穏、無事、安心、安全 Inner peace and calm; no inner trouble3) 繁栄 (商業的) Flourishing (business)4) 健康 (肉体的、精神的) ・・・健全、成熟…