2023-01-21 12:43
Announcing the release of a spooky festive satire: THE MADNESS OF IORIALUS BÓRO, now available to everyone, free of charge at https://www.aichaobang.com/works/the-madness-of-iorialus… Read More
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2022-06-03 14:19
Announcing the release of a major work: a critical walking history along the Capital Ring trail on the outskirts of London. In Search of the English – A Walking History is now availabl… Read More
2022-05-03 11:53
Thames Head, they’ve called these meadows since time immemorial. Here, they say, the river is born, in dandelion carpets beneath a broad Cotswold sky. Folk reckoning was buttre… Read More
2022-04-05 11:41
Lechlade and Cricklade. The Thames’s highest towns. Here at last is the river’s cradle, its nest of honey-and-mustard Cotswold limestone. Narrow, shallow and clogged with v… Read More
2021-12-28 15:52
Announcing the release of another of my principal written works. Turning the Camera Around – A Treatise on Autism and Normalism is now available to everyone, free of charge, at http://… Read More
2021-12-12 17:03
Here are the far heights. Field upon field, sky beyond sky, winter horizons out beyond the back door. Beyond England, even while of it – for this verdant world of their dreams lies f… Read More
2021-10-29 09:27
When stranded in an impossible world, there is no shame in seeking what you need in other worlds instead. Alienated and traumatised even before the COVID-19 pandemic, that has been my… Read More
2021-10-20 14:53
Through a haze of cloud, milky sunshine washes the plains of the high Thames. It is an early October morning, and the reason it is early is that from here on, out the back doors of Oxf… Read More
2021-10-01 14:37
A crossing for oxen, they called it. Good enough, right? Who doesn’t like oxen? They go nuuo. Watch them mooch across the river. Touch them, if you really want. Build your civilisation… Read More
2021-09-06 15:21
River Thames or Isis, the maps read now. What does it mean? Two names at once? Or are you expected to choose one or the other, like, say, chocolate or pistachio ice cream, or a red suitcase… Read More
2021-08-24 14:11
Is time like the river? There are places where it feels less like a flow, with one age succeeding another, than an accumulation of all ages together. Witness the Oxford Plain… Read More
2021-08-07 14:15
Privilege Forts like to appear immortal. That after all is how privilege protects itself: by seeding the belief that it’s innate, essential, morally ordained, rather than a violent se… Read More
2021-07-23 13:26
A hundred million years ago, England didn’t exist. Nor for all but the latest sliver of the ninety-nine million years that followed, for that matter. What about the land… Read More
2021-07-01 13:46
Today is more or less this. After the town at the centre of things, we come to an in-betweeny space where not much seems to happen. There are fields. Ducks. Overhead cables. It&rsquo&helli…Read More
2021-06-20 14:20
Reading. Redding, they pronounce it. Red bricks. Red blood. The English bleed. Over 125,000 deaths and counting, many avoidable. Failure – or worse, opportunities seized for bla… Read More
2021-06-04 09:46
Remember June 4th 1989. Remember the students, workers, intellectuals and citizens slaughtered not only in Tiananmen Square, but in the homes and streets of Beijing and other Chinese citie… Read More
2020-07-20 16:04
It’s 2020. COVID-19, lurching authoritarianism, mass atrocities. Chances are the political and human rights conditions of your country – or the one you are stuck in, like England… Read More
2020-04-12 16:30
Image: New ScientistThe COVID-19 pandemic is a common threat to all humankind. Much has been said about the need to put politics aside to unite against it. If only. For in this world of our… Read More
2020-03-29 15:20
After every storm comes the calm. And for the moment, what a calm. The river’s been holding out on us. Not anymore. The floods and clouds recede over a flawless dreamscape. The Chilte… Read More
2020-03-15 16:44
The river rages. It has had enough.An unsettled winter has broken on England in a sequence of devastating storms. The Severn watershed in the west of the country has borne the worst of it, b… Read More
2020-02-16 16:41
Eton College. What a pain. The cannon is because they knew we were coming.There is no straightforward way to handle this one. Most English people know of Eton College, if more through its m… Read More
2020-01-31 14:50
Once upon a time two reptiles sat by the river. One was a lizard which could open great frills around its head to appear much larger than it was. The other was a chameleon, constantly changi… Read More
2020-01-17 16:30
Today we have a tale of two towns. Chertsey and Staines emerged for opposite reasons. One was for going to, the other for going through. Each owed this to a singular crux: in one case a hous… Read More
2020-01-09 15:23
Dawn of a new year, and a new phase. Our journey up the Thames’s central valley begins here, and like the future of its people, the first light of 2020 finds it lost in fog. The triump… Read More
2019-12-17 13:36
The chill light of a winter morning falls on Putney Bridge, riding a tide that rises beyond the capital city. Having cleared the urban core, the water’s mood changes dramatically as it… Read More
2019-11-27 22:51
‘The Tower’, they call the shortest of these buildings. Do they not get the feeling its name has been somewhat overtaken?Upstream of Tower Bridge, the tidal Thames ebbs and flows… Read More
2019-11-07 15:12
Videogames and Politics in a time of Authoritarian Revival Some time ago, I wrote here of a very special computer game. A game which saved my life. A game which grew into a core aspect of my… Read More
2019-11-01 17:01
Thames Barrier to Tower BridgePeer through the Barrier. What do you see? Things absent for nearly all time, yet for this instant they bend the landscape around them as though they be most im… Read More
2019-10-15 12:11
Dark River. That is one interpretation of Tamesa, the name (or something approaching it) by which this watercourse was known to its ancient Celtic inhabitants, thereafter called Tamesis by… Read More
2019-09-26 15:20
This walk is not actually in London. When you hear London, perhaps your internal atlas opens on a shape somewhat like this:Officially, this is the present extent of what is tellingly titled… Read More
2019-06-20 14:36
Hong Kong is probably the one place in the world where I felt closest to a sense of home.That was more than twenty years ago. It was the mid-1990s, just as the curtain was coming down on mor… Read More
2019-06-13 13:00
In the southeastern corner of England, right at the end of the Kentish peninsula, the Isle of Thanet reaches out for Europe. Whether it means to shake its hand or wring its neck is another m… Read More
2017-09-30 15:08
‘Twas then that we parted, in yon shady glen On the steep, steep side of Ben LomondWhere in purple hueThe highland hills we viewAn’ the moon comin’ out in the gloamingSo ru… Read More
2017-09-04 14:16
During recent walks in various parts of London, it has come to my notice that this city suffers from a distinct shortage of public toilets. On top of that, where these essential facilities h… Read More
2017-06-24 11:02
It should not have happened. Words repeated thousands of times in the news this week, no less true for every repeat. But to think them, to agree with them, is one thing. To see the remains… Read More
2017-06-07 14:09
Justice, forced to take on tree surgery on a zero-hours contract because it has become too expensive to live in London Read More
2017-05-16 20:43
…although I will not deny that the thought of bringing this blog to a close has come to mind of late. After writing here regularly for the past six years, I am now attempting to rebu… Read More
2017-02-07 04:53
A drawing from the midst of catastrophic mental breakdown. Tokyo, March 2016In general, we wish happiness for the people we care about.Nowadays I find it very difficult to feel this wish. No… Read More
2016-10-06 08:18
There is an irony to coming up for air in a city synonymous with some of the worst air pollution in the world. These days the sun does not stand at midday so much as stagger and clutch at c… Read More
2016-08-21 02:32
We are often reminded these days of the wonderfulness of gratitude.If it is not presented as the solution to all possible problems, then it is at least, we are led to believe, the next best… Read More
2016-04-26 05:23
In the heart of Kanagawa stands a mountain like no other.Raise your eyes! For it soars beyond the grandest peaks of high TanzawaTo stand amidst the clouds and summer light, tall as the spir… Read More
2016-04-17 10:12
I hold a heart-shaped key.It has travelled so far.It seeks a heart-shaped doorBut try your locks as it might, it does not fit.A heart-shaped keyIt cannot open your doors.Your doors have str… Read More
2016-04-15 12:03
かべだ。 何を見てるの？ただの歩くかべだよ。悲し{… Read More
2016-04-14 06:27
（英語の原文：http://www.aichaobang.blogspot.jp/2016/03/mountains.html）中に穴がある。 開{… Read More
2016-04-13 12:58
Can you imagine a world without gender? No masculine. No feminine.We do not need them. We are one hundred billion, not two.For men are from Earth and women are from EarthAnd so too all those… Read More
2016-03-23 11:38
There is a hole inside It yawns and burnsAnd for countless years on end, nothing has filled it.None of the beautiful things in the world could fill it.The gales that sweep the marshes of Ken… Read More
2016-03-17 11:24
17th March 2016It's a wall.What is there to see? It's only a walking wall. A walking wall with a drawing of a sad face on it.Nothing more than a wall.How should I know how long it's been th… Read More
2016-02-25 10:56
A Voyage to Aomori, Part 5 of 5 There are those who claim that happiness has nothing to do with your circumstances, and everything to do with how you choose to respond to them. Su… Read More
2016-01-31 06:20
A Voyage to Aomori, Part 4 of 5 The Oirase River.Lake Towada.Many of Japan's most popular sites of nautral beauty are also immensely destructive volcanoes. Indeed, that volcanism tends to be… Read More
2015-08-21 06:54
In the video game Planescape: Torment, the following question (in potent iambic pentameter) emerges.What can change the nature of a man?(For “man”, read “human”.)It i… Read More
2015-04-16 06:56
Odawara is a coastal city of around 200,000 people and the main urban centre in the west of Kanagawa Prefecture, about an hour from Tokyo by train. Like Kawagoeup in Saitama, it is a h… Read More
2015-03-31 07:27
The return of spring to Japan brings ideal conditions for exploring the mountains and forests. Being several kinds of tired lately (one reason this blog has been slow of late), I started wit… Read More
2015-02-20 07:33
The mountains of Chichibu and Oku-Musashi in Saitama, north of Tokyo, recede into clusters of lowland hills around the centre of the prefecture, giving way towards the great Kanto Plain in t… Read More
2014-12-27 06:17
To round off this year's hiking, here is a mountain which will be familiar to anyone connected with Chichibu. Bukō-san (武甲山)stands at 1304 metres high, towering ove… Read More
2014-12-05 07:13
The Tokyo police, for the second time this year,have arrested a Japanese citizen, Megumi Igarashi, for expressing her plans to build a kayak modelled on her own vagina– or, as the offi… Read More
2014-11-15 08:19
When you think of Japanese culture and industry, wine might not be the most iconic piece of heritage that comes to mind. Consider, however, Katsunuma (勝沼), in Kōshū (… Read More
2014-10-31 04:21
Mount Fuji from the summit of Mitō-san. Mitō-san (三頭山, 1525m), the highest of the 'Three Mountains of Oku-Tama' in western Tokyo, is trickier to reach than the… Read More
2014-10-21 06:21
This is Fukushima.Yes, that Fukushima (福島). The prefecture in northern Japan brought to such suffering by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in March 2011, since when… Read More
2014-09-30 06:24
Recently, my honourable friend Kunal Mathur of Quixotic Quagmires issued a challenge to several persons, myself among them, to list the ten books that have most influenced their thinking.It… Read More
2014-09-20 07:28
In the 1180s, a certain Minamoto no Yoritomo (源頼朝) overcame the Taira clan in a national power struggle, and established a bakufu – that is, a military government… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
A Voyage to Aomori, Part 1 of 5It beckoned. Cold, remote and foreboding at the edge of Japan, an axe-shaped wildnerness unknown in the English-speaking world and far from everything.The Shim… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
A Voyage to Aomori, Part 2 of 5Eight mountains surround a lake at the centre of the Shimokita axe-blade. The wind ripples its surface, creating gentle waves which caress its sandy shore. It… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
The rhythms of a broken mindA poem23rd October 2015Many were the dreamsDreams of the world this could have beenThe world this should have been.Dreams of love.How much of what I did was good?… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
This story is dedicated to the millions of people, past and present, broken by the madnesses of their societies then blamed for their own suffering – especially to those who did not ma… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
On a clear day, look out from a high vantage point in Tokyo, such as Tokyo Tower or the Skytree. To the west the mountains ring the horizon, a reminder that everything here, even this… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
Warning: this article deals frankly with the subject of suicide. Some readers may find these themes distressing. If you have come upon this article because you (or someone you know) is consi… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
Musashi: the old province that encompassed the lands around what is now Tokyo. Though abolished in 1868 with the introduction of the prefecture system, the name was retained in many of its o… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
Many fine mountains rise up in the wilderness of Oku-Tama in western Tokyo. A couple are covered on this blog: the sacred Mitake-sanand pointy Ōdake-san, as well as the Takamizu three m… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
A voyage to Aomori, Part 3 of 5From the sanctuary of Osorezan I crossed back to this world of artifice and illusions. A two-hour descent from the Shimokita Peninsula by train brought me to A… Read More
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