Authors

Trained as an artist and architect, writes books about design and aesthetics. Among his most popular books are Wabi-Sabi and Arranging Things. He lives in San Francisco.

Linda C. Ehrlich is an independent scholar who has published extensively about world cinema and traditional theater. 

An anthropologist specializing in Japanese culture. As the only Westerner to have become a geisha, which she did as research for her Ph.D. and her books Geisha and Kimono, she was a consultant for Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha. 

A literary translator and scholar of postwar Japanese literature.

Author's first novel, Bakushū (“Autumn Wheat”) was published in the literary magazine Bungei kenkyūkai. It was well received by literary critics, which led to his decision to become a professional writer.

Melinda Joe is an American journalist and certified sake and wine specialist based in Tokyo, Japan. 

Best-selling author of visual books for understanding complex subjects about chemistry, Japanese, and geography. Author of Kanji Pictographics, Kana Pictographix, and Michael Rowley's KanjiPictoGraphix Dragon Pack.

A leading Japanese folklore scholar and rural advocate, walked 160,000 kilometers to conduct interviews and capture a dying way of life.

An art historian and contributor to Manga Max.

Studied traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean calligraphy.

A professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and has been teaching and writing about Japanese temple gardens for over twenty years

Retains an enormous following today. He is as famous for his darkly introspective novels as for the light-hearted children’s stories that are a staple of many Japanese textbooks.

Film critic who won over readers with film guides Stray Dogs & Lone Wolves: The Samurai Film Handbook, and Asia Shock: Horror and Dark Cinema from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Thailand. 

Paul Poynter is an artist, tree climber, and woodsman living in Matsumoto, Japan.

Polly Barton is an award-winning translator based in the UK.

An award-winning TV and film producer in Los Angeles, California.

Robert Whiting is a journalist and author who has lived in Tokyo on and off for more than half a century. Topics he has written on include sports, Tokyo nightlife, and crime.

Born in the Philippines and is a former Jesuit priest turned master practicing in the Sanbo Kyodan lineage of Zen.

Was a 5th-generation Kyoto dyer who dedicated his life to reviving and preserving techniques of natural dyeing, giving lectures and workshops in Japan and internationally. 

Seiichi Tanaka is Founder and Director, San Francisco Taiko Dojo, the most prominent taiko group outside Japan. 

Collaborated with her husband Shogo Oketani, on a book about kanji for tattoos, a collection of poetry by a pacifist Japanese soldier, and a Young Adult trilogy about a young female ninja's quest to save her ancestral land.

An author whose work has also appeared in Wild Places and American Fiction. Her novel, Namako: Sea Cucumber was published by Coffee House Press and named Best Book for the Teen-Age by the New York Public Library. 

Lived in Japan for 20 years, designing gardens for individuals, companies, and temples. Author of The Japanese Tea Garden, The Art of Setting Stones and Japanese Garden Design (Tuttle Publishing, 2000). He is co-author (with Jiro Takei) of Sakuteiki: Visions of the Japanese Garden, (Tuttle, 2001).

Living in Korea since 1996, covering Korean pop culture for such publications as the New York Times, Billboard, and Newsweek. His 2008 book, Pop Goes Korea, looked at how Korea became a pop culture powerhouse.

Most famous poet of the Edo period in Japan. During his lifetime, Bashō was recognized for his works in the collaborative haikai no renga form; today, after centuries of commentary, he is recognized as the greatest master of haiku (then called hokku).

A longtime editor at Kodansha International and now freelance translator, Michael Brase counts among his translations The Manga Biography of Kenji Miyazawa, The Culture of Japan as a New Global Value, and The Building of Horyu-ji.

She read widely in fiction and poetry from an early age. In 1968 she received the Gendaishi Techo Prize for poetry. In 1979 she received the Izumi Kyoka Prize, and in 1988 the current work, Oh, Tama! (Tama ya), received the Women's Literature Award.

Published five collections of haiku, and authored or co-authored another 22 prose works including essays, season- word compendiums, books on haiku for beginners, and a two-volume set of interviews with notable Showa-era poets.

Wrote The Diary of Lady Murasaki, a volume of poetry, and The Tale of Genji. Within a decade of its completion, Genji was distributed throughout the provinces; within a century it was recognized as a classic of Japanese literature and had become a subject of scholarly criticism.

A Japanese journalist, historian, social critic and biographer of literary figures such as Yukio Mishima and Osamu Dazai. His biography was published in English under the title Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima, edited and adapted by Hiroaki Sato.

Manages K.O. Language Services together with his wife, Kiyomi. He is currently involved in translation projects spanning a variety of fields, from contracts to subtitles.

Lectured on Japanese popular culture at the University of Chicago and Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he earned a Masters of Arts degree and worked as an announcer for WSIU-FM. He has been published in Channels of Communication and the Journal of Popular Culture. 

Paul McCarthy has taught Japanese literature in the United States and comparative literature in Japan and Korea for forty years.

Peter Cowie has spent his life writing about cinema, and in particular about the prodigious talents that emerged during the 1950s and 1960s such as Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa. 

Rebecca Copeland is a professor of Japanese literature at Washington University in St. Louis, a writer of fiction and literary criticism, and a translator of Japanese literature.

Erudite and energetic, who hosts the web site Tokyo Q, has lived in Tokyo for over 20 years and is a popular commentator on Tokyo city life and food.

Studied the history of Japanese gardens at Kyoto University and taught at Cal Berkeley in the departments of architecture and landscape architecture as a visiting lecturer for 20 years.

SWET is a community of writers, editors, and translators, as well as copyeditors, proofreaders, book designers, copywriters, teachers, researchers, rewriters, and others working mainly between Japanese and English, and mainly in Japan or for Japanese clients.

Sean Michael Wilson is a comic book writer from Scotland who has had more than 30 books published with a variety of US, UK and Japanese publishers.

Chairman and CEO of Fujifilm Holdings Corporation. Mr. Komori was appointed CEO in 2003 and chairman in 2012.