Books on Asia Amy Chavez

Author and travel-writer Angus Waycott talks about his 8-day walk around Sado Island off Niigata Prefecture in the Japan Sea. He gives us in-depth accounts of: a mujina (tanuki-worshipping) cult, funa-ema (literally "ship horse pictures"), exile (including those of Zeami and Buddhist priest Nichiren), and the controversy behind the Kinzan gold mine and its "slave labor," all topics that he recorded in his book "Sado: Japan's Island in Exile," originally published by Stone Bridge Press in 1996 and re-issued as an e-book by the author in 2012 and 2023.

We talk with publisher Peter Goodman and author/translator Frederik L. Schodt about artificial intelligence as it relates to writing and publishing books.

In this episode of the Books on Asia podcast, host Amy Chavez talks with author and translator Frederik L. Schodt, who has written/translated many books on Japan including The Osamu Tezuka Story, Manga, Manga!: The The World of Japanese Comics, The Astro Boy Essays, and My Heart Sutra: The World in 260 Characters.

In this episode of the BOA podcast, host Amy Chavez talks with John Ross, a New Zealand writer based in Taiwan. Ross has spent three decades in Asia, and co-founded Camphor Press, a publishing house focused on East Asia. He also co-hosts Formosa Files, a weekly podcast on the history of Taiwan.

In this episode of the Books on Asia Podcast, Amy speaks with John Rucynski, editor of "A Passion for Japan: A Collection of Personal Narratives," which includes 31 writers and asks not why they came to Japan, but why they stayed.

Stephen Mansfield, a British writer and photo-journalist based in Japan and author of Tokyo: A Biography, talks about the city.