a note on the Japan Stories

The Old material in Japan stories will be mainly cuts from Thank You and OK!: an American Zen Failure in Japan, or at least were written at that time and so some things will make more sense to one familiar with that book which has much more on most of the proper nouns herein, the people and places. If a piece is marked Hogoji it is something written about my time at Shogoji, an old small Soto Zen temple in the mountains near a hot springs resort town called Kikuchi which is near Kumamoto in Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's main four islands. When I've gone through all of that cut material, my intention is to go back and edit it so that it can stand by itself better here on cuke.com. In Thank You and OK I changed most of the names and I leave them that way for now. With a few exceptions, this material is the way I left it ten years ago. - DC

The New material in Japan Stories I'm putting up as I write it and it will be about my visit there from December 15, 2003 to January 15, 2004 - with possibly some asides to experiences in India where I spent three months last fall and Thailand which was six weeks and maybe a little Singapore. I also plan to go back into the memory banks to bring forth experiences from when I lived in Japan that I didn't write about and to tell about going there for ten days in '94 to interview people for Crooked Cucumber. 

That's the plan for now. We'll see what happens.

Oh - I go back and edit and make additions and changes and try to remember to put on the date of the latest edit.