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“The Lobster Sex Guy” and “Sushi Concierge” are TradeMarks of Trevor Corson.

Japan

Trevor’s book The Story of Sushi contains surprising revelations about the history and culture of Japanese food, but less apparent is Trevor’s other deep interest in Japan, which has little to do with food.


Trevor met his first Buddhist priest in Japan when he was 16, while living with a Japanese family on a homestay program in Tokyo. Trevor went on to become a fluent speaker of Japanese and to live in Japan for three years. Japan’s mainstream corporate culture of “salarymen” struck him as rather boring, but the Buddhist priests whom Trevor got to know turned out to be some of the most delightfully whimsical people he’d ever met—nothing like the staid Western stereotype.


In preparation for a graduate degree Trevor delved into research at Princeton University and then at Taisho University’s Institute of Buddhist Studies in Tokyo, focussing on an esoteric sect of Japanese Buddhism called Shingon, or “True Word,” more closely related to Tibetan Buddhism than to the Japanese Zen tradition. He lived among Shingon priests and their families, spending as much time sitting around their kitchen tables eating, chatting, and boozing—yes, boozing—as he did in their temple halls chanting and meditating. Trevor wrote an in-depth academic study (still unpublished) about the founder of the Shingon sect, a ninth-century magician-priest and imperial advisor named Kukai, worshipped throughout Japan yet mostly unknown in the West.


Trevor never completed his graduate degree—he gave it up to go catch lobsters in Maine—but he’s still hoarding reams of notes and writings on Japanese Buddhism that he hopes to return to someday. In the meantime, he writes frequently on Japan and continues to visit the country.


 

TREVOR CORSON

Topics

Lobsters       Sushi       China       Japan

Selected Writings on Japan

by Trevor Corson



Found in Translation

Eating sushi can be a recipe for disaster. Especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Princeton Alumni Weekly, February 3, 2010


Old-School Miso Soup

Limp seaweed, moldy fish shavings, and rotting soybeans. The result? Yum—Mother Nature’s MSG.

Serious Eats, September 17, 2008


The Telltale Heart

On the streets of Tokyo, accidents caused by Japanese “reckless driving gangs” are helping to push politicians and Buddhist priests into an international debate about just what, exactly, is death.

Transition Magazine, Fall 2000


The Magic of Buddhism

Japan’s most famous Buddhist was a political mastermind who created a secret arsenal of magic spells to heal disease, end drought, vanquish enemies—and make himself the right-hand man to the emperor.

Kyoto Journal, July 2000


Dreamcasting Japan

"Japan's economy is in a terrible recession," my friend Jun, a Buddhist priest, complained as he gunned his temple's Saab 9000 Turbo, bought during the bubble years, through the alleyways of old-town Tokyo.
"On the other hand, now we have the Head Mount Display." This, apparently, was something attached to his Sony Playstation.

Atlantic Online, March 17, 1999


The Calligraphy Path

It is a magic moment when a Westerner confronts a kanji—one of the convoluted characters used in the Japanese writing system—and makes it his own.

Yokohama Echo, September 1, 1993


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