Links to Published Articles

Recent articles published by Kyodo News:

Yayoi Kusama's LA exhibit drawing enthusiasts

Japanese 'wine king' exhibit lost in California wildfires



My 80-page graduate thesis at UC Berkeley looked into the appeal of abandoned buildings as a photographic subject and how the popularity of this genre has had an impact on the issue of architectural preservation when it comes to modern structures in Japan. This article, published as the cover story in the Tokyo English-language magazine Metropolis, is a much abbreviated version of my scholarly paper:

No Man's Land



FluentU is a language learning blog. Here are two articles I wrote for them (very much in the style and format of the site) on learning Japanese:

How to Watch Japanese Dubbed Movies Online and Off

The Chillest Way to Study Japanese: Curl Up on the Couch and Watch Japanese TV Online

From 2007 through 2012, I worked for a Japanese publishing company whose client was Toyota Motor Corporation. My main duty was writing and editing a global magazine called Team Toyota, which promoted Toyota's corporate philosophy and marketing campaigns to distributors around the world. Here's an example of one feature article:

Mission for Marketing



















In the summer of 2006, before starting my second year of graduate studies at UC Berkeley, I was a news intern at the Daily Yomiuri newspaper in Tokyo. I wrote this story, but it was pulled at the last minute by the managing editor because he felt it was too political and made property developer Mitsui Fudosan into the "bad guy." A lot of time and effort went into the story, so of course I was disappointed. However, this article served as a turning point for me as it eventually helped me decide on the architecture/photography angle for Master's thesis.

Saving the Sanshin Building


This feature cover story, published way back in 2003 in Metropolis magazine, showed how young Tokyo-ites embraced hip-hop music, fashion and dance and made it uniquely Japanese.

From the Hip






For a couple years in Tokyo I was a regular bar reviewer for Metropolis magazine. Here's some links to a few samples of my reviews from their online archives:

Dabre's Bar

Insomnia

Donzoko

Usagiya



Here's an article I wrote before "Star Wars - Episode I - The Phantom Menace" was released:

Nitpicker menaces Star Wars galaxy (Marin Independent Journal)






Here's an article I wrote about how science fiction author Philip K. Dick used Marin County and the Bay Area as locations in his novels and stories (notice how there's no hyphen in science-fiction on this article, but the one below has a hypen, the result of different editors working without a consistent style-guide! Blasphemy!):

Marin's master of science fiction (Marin Independent Journal) (part 1)

Marin's master science fiction (part 2)











Here's an article I wrote about the author Neal Stephenson:

He applies cyber touch to science-fiction (Marin Independent 
Journal)

(part 2)