About

Japaninfusion.com was created to celebrate, introduce, explain and discuss Japanese culture and aesthetics. Our goal is to help people bring the best of Japan into their lives.

The articles on the site are meant to provide you with an extra layer of understanding of Japanese culture and history. We offer in-depth, step-by-step tips on various facets of the country’s culture, cuisine and aesthetics to help you try these things for yourself.

The site also features articles on people who have helped create the best of Japanese culture at home or helped promote it overseas.

Our final hope is that Japaninfusion.com allows you to infuse your favorite parts of Japanese culture and aesthetics into your life, whether it be in your garden, your home, your daily life or your imagination.

Contributors

Takumi Ono is the president and CEO of Junglecity.com, an award-winning Japanese-language portal dedicated to providing extensive and up-to-date information on Seattle and Washington state. Traffic to the site exploded after Takumi started the company in 1998. Today the site gets approximately 2.3 million page views and 60,000 unique visitors each month.

Born and raised in Kobe, an international port city in western Japan, Takumi was swept away by British pop music — especially Wham! — in junior high school and began planning to study abroad. She spent a year in a high school in Australia in 1989 and eventually found her way to Seattle the following year. She graduated with an MA in economics from Seattle University in 1996.

Takumi grew to love Seattle over the years and figured that other Japanese would too if they had more information to help them navigate the city. Thus Junglecity Network Inc. and its flagship website, Junglecity.com, were born.

During her years abroad, Takumi has also developed a deep appreciation of her home culture, especially the healthy lifestyle at its core. She is excited to share that appreciation with readers of JapanInfusion.com.

Takumi lives in Seattle with her husband.

Taichi Kitamura is a sushi chef, fly fisher and food lover. He owns and operates Chiso restaurant in the Fremont district in Seattle. Taichi was born in Japan’s ancient capital of Kyoto, and he grew up in a family that ran cafés there.

Taichi came to the US as a high school student. He stayed on after graduation to study at Seattle University in the mid 1990s. Once he graduated from university, Taichi realized that he wanted to learn the sushi business and eventually open his own restaurant.

His dream came true when he opened Chiso in September 2001. He slowly built a loyal base of customers, and now the restaurant is consistently rated one of the city’s best sushi bars.

Taichi calls himself the only fly-fishing sushi chef in Seattle. He loves the challenge of matching the hatch on the Yakima River. He also regularly goes steelheading on the rivers of the Olympic Peninsula and the Puget Sound. He feels fortunate to be able to live in the United States, a country that lets him live his balanced lifestyle as an amateur fly fisher and a professional sushi chef.

Bruce Rutledge is a journalist, author and teacher who lived in Japan for 15 years before returning to the US in 2002 to found Chin Music Press, a Seattle-based publishing company. During his time in Japan, Bruce worked in just about every media and teaching job known to man. The country allowed him to lead an urban, white-collar version of Louis L’Amour’s life, and for that, he will always be indebted.

Bruce worked as chief copy editor of The Nikkei Weekly, editor in chief of J@pan Inc magazine, a part-time lecturer at Tsukuba University and the University of Tokyo and as a free-lance writer for Asiaweek and many other publications.

Bruce has a bachelor’s degree from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Bruce feels blessed to be living during the digital revolution, which has expanded the scope for literary adventures by leaps and bounds. With JapanInfusion.com, Bruce wants to chronicle the elusive way Japanese culture has been seeping into the US and how it has changed American habits and sensibilities.

Yuko Enomoto, a former journalist for The Japan Times, Knight Ridder and Bridge News in Tokyo, recently finished the translation of Sumie Kawakami’s Goodbye Madame Butterfly: Sex, Marriage and the Modern Japanese Woman, published by Chin Music Press. Yuko is an avid reader of Dwell magazine and a budding modernist. She likes small, ecological homes as well as innovative design and interior ideas. JapanInfusion.com allows her to explore the connections between the modernist and Japanese aesthetics.

Yuko was born in Manila of Japanese parents. She also lived in Hong Kong, Los Angeles and Tokyo during her early years. She attended international schools in Japan, graduating from the American School in Japan and going on to get her bachelor’s degree from Sophia University in Tokyo. Later, she received a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Yuko’s life in two cultures gives her keen insight into the topics being discussed on JapanInfusion,com. She lives in Seattle with her husband Bruce and their three children.