 Welcome, everyone, to the making of My Heart Sutra, a world in 260 characters with author Fred Schott and publisher Peter Goodman of Stonebridge Press. My name is Taryn Edwards, and I am one of the librarians at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with the Mechanics Institute, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library, the oldest, in fact, designed to serve the general public in California, not just those of you who wield wrenches. We also are a cultural event center and a world-renowned chess club that is the oldest in the United States. Right now, due to the shelter in place, or whatever you want to call this situation, since we're not exactly sheltering due to the pandemic, we are all of our activities at the Institute are virtual right now, but I encourage you to consider becoming a member with us. It is only $120 a year. And with that, you help support our continued contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. Our speakers today are Fred Schott and Peter Goodman. And Frederick has been a Mechanics Institute member for almost 30 years. He's an award-winning writer, translator, and his books focus on the cultural interplay between Asia, especially Japan and North America. And the Institute's been lucky enough to host him three times for three of his books now. In 2009, the Emperor of Japan awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette. And I'm sure he'll explain what that means exactly. And he received this for his help in introducing and promoting Japanese contemporary popular culture. With him today, we also have his friend and publisher, Peter Goodman. Peter is President and publisher of Stonebridge Press, as well as a number of other things. He's an editor, he's a ghostwriter, he's a translator, he's a project manager, and he's also a podcaster, a Renaissance man. Not that old. Stonebridge was founded in 1989 and it really exemplifies the small and independent press that has a national reach due to its distribution by consortium book sales. And I'm sure because of other wonderful things. Peter was also board chair of the Independent Book Publishers Association until 2017 and was most recently the host of their podcast Inside Independent Publishing. So during this conversation, we hope to find out more about both these gentlemen and about the making of the book My Heart Sutra. If you have any questions, please post them in the chat space and we will use those to help facilitate our conversation together. So thank you very much for coming today. This conversation is being recorded and we will post it afterwards on the Mechanics Institute's YouTube channel and I will send that out to you all via Eventbrite so you can watch it again or share it with your friends. Anyhow, thank you so much and welcome, Fred and Peter. Thank you. It's an honor to be here and it's an honor to be invited by the Mechanics Library, which I'm a huge fan of and I suggest anyone who's never been there when the pandemic eases that you go look at it because it's also one of the most interesting, beautiful libraries. I know it certainly is. So where do we go from here? Well, let's see. I really wanted Peter to introduce Stonebridge Press a little bit more because I know we have a lot of writers who are attending today and I think the interplay between each other and how Stonebridge Press really is at the start of your relationship. I mean, how did you meet and let's talk about Stonebridge? Peter? Well, great. Okay. Well, I'm happy to talk about Stonebridge. It's actually got quite a long history. It's been about 30 years since I started up Stonebridge, but I actually got into publishing a number of years before that. I went to Japan for the first time in 1975. Thanks, Parley, to the demonstrations of my very good friend, Lauren Hare, who is happens to be in the gallery here. So thank you, Lauren, or I'm not sure I should thank you. I should blame you for all the stuff that has happened. I didn't speak any Japanese when I went. Probably the case with most people, I enrolled in a college there. But my real goal of getting there was actually to join a publishing company because in my last year in university in the United States, I had taken a class in Japanese literature and been so impressed that most of the wonderful books that we read that class had all been published by one of three different English language publishers in Tokyo at the time. And I got into my head that this is something that I should be doing. I was an English major, so really the job prospects for me were not so great to begin with. And I actually eventually made it to Japan and I ended up working for one of those companies, Charles E. Tuttle and Company, which probably a bunch of you have heard of. And that led to a number of different jobs and acquaintances in the editorial world in Japan. It was kind of a small world, us working in English language books and I connected with Kodansh International and ended up there. And it was a result of that that I ended up doing my first book with Fred. And Fred is someone that I met when I was at International Christian University in Tokyo. That was a school that I enrolled with. Fred was, oh, he was much senior, much more adept than I was. Much younger. I remember we had a tonkatsu lunch in Yotsuya someday and you said you had some sort of book on manga that you were doing. And that was the very first book that Fred brought in when I was working at Kodansh International in Tokyo. This was a book that ended up being called Manga Manga, the world of Japanese comics. And it was the first book in English about manga. And while it was actually very well received in the United States, and as far as I know, it's still in print, the Japanese company that I worked for was very, very reluctant to issue it. They kind of were embarrassed by manga and particularly the popularity of it. They kind of wanted to keep it under wraps. And this was probably at a time in the world, you know, before there was all this interconnectivity, the internet, etc. You probably could keep a lot of things quiet. But nevertheless, Fred persisted and I helped push it through the sales meeting at Kodansh and it ended up coming out. And when I finally got back to the States, I'd left Kodansh and ended up setting an editorial services firm named Tokyo Pages with Pamela Pasty, who is also in the gallery here by Pamela. And that only that last about two years, because there were a lot of changes in Tokyo, we couldn't sustain that without their support. And they were, they were going through some things. So I ended up going independent and becoming just Stonebridge Press in Berkeley, California, my own little company. And as a result of that, we, you know, I, Fred and I stayed in touch because he was living in San Francisco. He gave his book, American, the Four Japan's, which would be one of the very first Stonebridge Press books. And then subsequently, every, I don't know, three or four years, Fred, you keep saying this is the last book I'll ever write. You have a lunch, you have another idea. You say, are you going to publish this? And I say, of course, Fred, I'm your publisher. I'm your friend. Who else is going to publish it? You say you promise? Is this real? And so this has been going on for almost 30 years now that Stonebridge has been publishing Fred's books. It's a, it's been a wonderful relationship. I mean, as you can see, we still get along. We did. And I'm just really, really happy, you know, because I'm just sort of a behind the scenes guy. I'm a facilitator, you know, I help authors get their, get their word out and try and package it in a way that makes it accessible. I use whatever editorial expertise I have to refine their communications and presented in a nice package. But ultimately, you know, the authors are responsible for the content. In Fred's case, the content has been across the board, really wonderful, innovative and very, very revealing. You know, Fred, I've worked with many, many, many authors, you know, hundreds of authors writing about Japan. And Fred is, you know, really at the, at the very top of the list in terms of people who know their stuff, who research, they're very diligent. I mean, I can't tell you the number of times Fred has gone. No, I'm not just, I'm not just, you know, I don't really ever have an opportunity to, to tell people how wonderful Fred is as an author and beyond a, you know, wonderful human being and a friend and all that. But as an author is these qualities that make authors very, very successful and develop a huge readership that believes in what they say. I mean, Fred won't tell you this, but he has fans all over the world. And I mean, I think initially he sort of got into the kind of universe of fandom through his work in manga, which was really revolutionary and opened the world's eyes to what was happening in Japan in terms of graphic art. And it's really transformed graphic art around the globe. But beyond that, you know, Fred has impressed almost everyone he's ever worked with, with his diligence and his, you know, desire to get the story right. I'm sending you a check later. Yeah. Well, there's about time, Fred. But anyway, so I mean, Fred has been like an anchor in the Stonebridge line. And we've also published other authors that I think are also up there. We were Donald Ritchie's, one of Donald Ritchie's publishers in his last two decades of his life, published in Inland Sea, which is his classic travelogue about traveling in Japan as a young man. We also published some books by a fellow named Leonard Corrin, who is kind of a well known kind of cerebral designer, revolutionary thinker, and he's probably most best known among the Japan crowd for his seminal work called Wabi Sabi, which introduced the concept of Wabi and Sabi to American audiences in the 1990s. And it's gone to, well, it's gone to become something kind of crazy, I mean, used for cosmetics, used for describing relationships. But it's also been adopted by a lot of American artists, architects, ceramists, et cetera, as kind of a guiding light. And kind of as the antithesis of digital culture and digital culture, everything you ever produce is new from the moment you reproduce it. The bits are always the same. But Wabi Sabi offers kind of a different approach to your understanding of the world, your appreciation of how time passes, and how the cosmos is evolving. And so I'm very glad, you know, Stomberg just had a hand in introducing some of these concepts like Wabi Sabi and some of the insights into Japan and world culture that people like Fred and Donald Ritchie have given. So that's enough about me for now. So I'm sure you're all interested in hearing more from Fred. You should also mention you're bringing out Robert Whiting, right? Yes, we've got a whole bunch of interesting folks coming out. Among them is Robert Whiting, who's written a lot on Japanese baseball. Yeah, he was actually an influence on me. Oh, is that right, Fred? Did you know? Well, I'm learning this now. But there's books called Tokyo Junkie. Whiting lived in Japan, or still lives in Japan, but he came in 1964 around the time of the Olympics. So this book is kind of bookended by the very, very successful 1964 Olympics and the yet to be determined Olympics of what was going to be 2020 and now might be 2021. And this is a book full of like amazing stories of his life on the streets, particularly in the early years when Tokyo was a much more rough and tumble kind of town that it is now. Yakuza, street fights, rough folger taxi drivers, and lots of time spent in bars and watching Japanese baseball on TV. It's a really fun book. Thanks for the plug, Fred. You're welcome. I think the Stonebridge Press link in the chat space. But Fred, I wanted to ask you, this is the third book that you presented to the Mechanics Institute's audience. You presented the Professor Risley and the Imperial Japanese troop, the circus troop that came to San Francisco, and then you also presented for Immigrant's Manga. Can you tell the audience, many of whom are unfamiliar with you, how you became fascinated with Japan and the relationship with the Bay Area? Yeah. Well, I guess my involvement with Japan is different from a lot of people because I think many people, they are living in Europe or the United States or North America. And they, I mean, I've met people who, you know, they wake up, they're really big fans of like ninja, and they wake up one morning and think, I got to go to Japan, that kind of thing. Or they read a lot of manga and think, I got to go to Japan. I'm not like that at all. I didn't want to go to Japan at all. I was born in Washington, DC, but I grew up overseas because my father was in the Foreign Service and a diplomat. So I grew up in Norway for five years. And then I grew up in Australia for five years. And I was temporarily supposed to go to Paris for school because my father was temporarily assigned to Paris. So I was actually registered in American school in Paris. And then we were looking forward to that. And then one day my dad came home and he said, actually, things have changed. We're not going to France. We're going to Tokyo. We're going to Japan. And I didn't know anything about Japan. I was 15. You know, I had a horse and I had a dog. I had a gun. I was living a very, very unusual life in Australia. And my main impression of Japan was what I had seen in movies and TV. Actually, we didn't even have TV where I was living for a long time in Canberra. But the Australian perspective of Japan then was heavily covered, colored by the war in the Pacific. And it was probably the most miserable part of the war in the Pacific because the Americans did all the bombing and the spectacular stuff. And then they left the Australians to clean up in the jungles in New Guinea. So I always thought of Japan as a place where there must be a lot of jungle. I didn't know much of it all. And we wound up going to Japan via San Francisco in 1965. And it was quite extraordinary now when I think about it because I went on a passenger ship, which doesn't exist today. And we got to Yokohama in October of 65. And I just remember that it was so gray. Everything was gray. The weather was gray. The houses were gray. They were all this low, a lot of stucco buildings, one-story, two-story kind of thing. And I just thought, holy cow, what has happened? Because Australia at the time had a population, I think, of about 17 million or something like that, 18 million. And Tokyo, of course, has the same population in a tiny area. Australia is the size of the United States. And I was enrolled there in international school. I actually wanted to take Japanese classes, but it was a different era. And the guidance counselor who kind of shepherded me, she said, well, Japanese won't help you in the future. And besides which, you're almost 16. You're going to be graduating in a couple of years. You won't have enough time to learn Japanese. And American colleges probably wouldn't accept your credits anyway. So you should study French. So I studied French for two and a half years in high school. And I lived in it. The last year, my parents left, and I was lucky I was able to find a dormitory for missionary kids that allowed me to stay there and finish my high school. And many of these kids had grown up in rural Japan, like Matt, actually, who's here today. And they've gone to Japanese school up to like seventh or eighth grade. And they spoke really good Japanese. And my roommate was a very interesting person. His name was Larry Kelly. And he spoke Japanese. And he was also just a very eccentric American who was interested in forestry and all kinds of things. And we started traveling around Japan on holidays. And we both had motorcycles and did all kinds of things. And I was just so amazed because I realized that if you know the language, you'd have so much fun in Japan. So then when I went to college in the United States, I started studying Japanese. And after two years, and I have to say, I wasn't all that happy. We had so much violence in my university in Santa Barbara in California because of the Vietnam War. So I applied to go back to Japan and study Japanese. And I went to ICU where I eventually met Peter. And I was there actually a couple of years doing intensive study of Japanese. Then I came back to the United States. And I was kind of a hippie for a while and traveled. He checked all over America and did odd jobs in Santa Barbara. And then I got a job as a tour guide for Japanese in LA. And I was probably one of the first Europeans to do that sort of thing. And I also took them to Mexico and Canada and Las Vegas. And it was really good for my Japanese, I must say. And then I thought, well, I don't think I can stand to be a tour guide for the rest of my life. So I applied for a scholarship to study interpreting and translation at the same university where I had been before. And that's, I went back and that's, I think, where I met Peter for the first time. And actually, I came back to the United States, I worked as a professional translator in Japan for a while. And then I came back to the United States to the Bay Area in 1978. And I've been here ever since. And I've actually made my living primarily as an interpreter. As Riko, who's on this session, Riko Fields knows. Thank you, Riko. Because she hired me several times. And also, I often have worked with Matt Stevens, who's another professional interpreter. And that's it. Brad, sorry to interrupt you. There's another interpreter, Mayim Baran here. Oh, hi. Great. Hi. Wonderful. So, and, you know, I've always been fascinated by the relationship between North America and Japan and always just had kind of eccentric interests, which has probably, it's been fun for me that probably hasn't, my books probably haven't made much money for Peter. Let's put it that way. But I work with Stonebridge now for many years. And and Peter and I are good friends. I think we have, Peter, you hate, you probably hate to have me say this, but I think we have almost a 19th century relationship between the writer and publisher and editor. It's based on really on friendship and kind of an ancient British concept of, you know, my word is my bond kind of thing. And Peter has always been great. And he lives close enough so that I always know that there's a real problem. I can always throw a mallet cocktail through his house. So that brings us up to today. And that's me. Well, that was fascinating. Now, why don't I mean, it explains a it explains a lot to me who I've, you know, I don't know you very well, but we've stayed in touch for 10 years now. We're friends. You came to the book launch party. I want to know more about the genesis of this book, because it is different from your other, from your other titles. Yeah. Well, I don't want to take too much time away from Peter here, but I get thoughts in my head and I become interested in very niche things. And I, I, in a way, writing the book was sort of an archaeology of my own memory. It was also not only a way to learn for me to learn about the heart sutra, but to learn or figure out how did I become attached to this sutra and what was my own connection to it. And I actually took a class once in Santa Barbara. And I have actually found it in my trunk. I have a piece of paper with my notes on it. And in that class, it was class on Buddhism. And there was mention of the heart sutra and we were actually handed a copy of it. And I wrote on it because I found this paper while I was writing the book and it says, this is all you need to know. And I also heard our recital of the heart sutra. I don't know whether it was the entire sutra or it was just the mantra portion, which is very short at the end. And it goes And I heard Alan Ginsberg recite that as part of a poetry reading in LA in 1975, I think, four or five, when I was living in LA. And I, the mantra part of the heart sutra is what really drew me to it. And it's always been a focus for me. It's been important for me. And then several years ago or many years ago, I just started thinking in the back of my mind, well, and I actually write about this in the book, I thought it's kind of odd that I am fixated on this mantra, but I don't really know much about the entire sutra. And the sutra itself is very short. It's only 260 Chinese characters or 262 if you live in Japan. So that was the idea for a book. It was for me to work through, you know, how did I develop this relationship with this mantra and then later the sutra. And it drove me to memorize it and also to study it and to learn about it and eventually to write a book about it. And usually what happens is Peter has always already mentioned as I'm sort of possessed by some weird interest in something. And then I say, Peter, would you like to publish my book? And I never expect him to really do so, but he does, which is amazing. He agrees to publish these very, very niche books. And it's actually wonderful. I have a couple ideas for other books now, but unfortunately, they don't have anything to do with Japan. I think, what am I going to do? So anyway, that's my, does that kind of give a good lead into? Yes. And you know what? I just wanted to mention to the other writers here, find a friend who's a publisher. And all your problems will be solved, it sounds like. Well, yeah, I've been very lucky to be able to work with Peter. I've had the unfortunate experience of working with a couple of big New York publishers, and it was a disaster. And for me, I like to work with people. Maybe it's a Japanese thing, but I like to work with people I know and I trust. And the relationship means a lot to me. So Peter's always been a good friend, and I think he would be a good friend, even if he weren't publishing my books. And it's just wonderful. I, as a result, I think I have probably more say in how my books come out and a lot more control over the content. And Peter allows me to put in my words. I'd like this or that and titles and something editors always argue about, but he's the one responsible for putting the word manga in my first book, actually. So I've worked with Peter when he was, before he was in Stonebridge Press, and after he was in Stonebridge Press on, you know, manga related things and a robot related things and international relations and history and exotic histories and that sort of thing. It's been great. Yeah. One thing that struck me about your books is that they are beautifully packaged. And so I wanted to ask Peter, how you go about making such beautiful books? Well, I guess, you know, every every book has its own little world that it inhabits. And when a book first comes in, I have a general idea of, you know, who it's for, what it's about, how, whether it's an academic book or whether it's a trade book, whether it needs kind of a classical approach or whether it needs a kind of a poppy, zappy kind of pop culture approach. And it, you know, it just sort of grows into itself as kind of how I feel. I don't think it's always a deliberate act, but there's a bunch of very, very small decisions that are made, but each of them are kind of guided by a sense of where the book needs to be when it's finally done. It's a little hard to explain. But I am very involved, I guess, in all the things that go into the book, everything from the typeface to the trim size, which is the size of the book, the artwork on the front, the titling, all that sort of thing. And it's, I don't know, it's each book, like I say, each book is its own world. And I just try and be very responsive to what I feel it ought to be in the end. That's actually, you know, I think a lot of publishers talk about their books as being their children. And I think that's kind of what they're talking about, that they see it come from like a seed that's like only half formed and then it grows. And it does kind of feel like these books grow on their own. And that's why they're also very distinctly different when they're grown up. I should also say that Peter is quite remarkable in the sense that, and quite rare, I think, in the sense that he started out in a pre-computer age, and he's been involved in publishing all the way through. So he knows how publishing has evolved. And, you know, I wrote my first book on a typewriter and cut and paste was a physical thing. I actually cut the papers and then glued them together and then tore them apart. So Peter's been involved in this publishing business through this incredibly revolutionary period. And I think very few people really know all the stages of publishing what he does. Well, it was kind of fortunate to, in the sense that I do know how it was in the old days when everything was done on typewriters with scissors and scotch tape. And I remember we, when I started out at Tuttle, I would work on typewriter manuscripts that would be sent in by authors who were overseas. And I would work on the hard copy, you know, with a red pencil, classic red pencil. And if I had a big bit of text that had to be replaced, I'd have to type it out separately and cut it out of a piece of paper and scotch tape it onto the side of the manuscript. And we would send them off to Korea. There was a Korean typesetting company that Mr. Tuttle liked to use called Samwa. And they would keep it for two or three months. And suddenly it would reappear back, typeset, full of errors. We'd go through these different rounds of production. And now it's so completely different. But as Fred was saying, it does help to kind of understand where all the rules and conventions of good typography and book design came from. A lot of them were based on the physical limitations of the materials and resources that you were working with. Yeah, I think that your experience is really reflected in the book itself. I mean, as a librarian, I see all kinds of strange books. So I just want to say yours have a wonderful form. Oh, thank you. And I think it's because of your experience. Since we are in the, I hope the tail end of the pandemic, but maybe not. I just am wondering how Stonebridge is affected by these worldwide challenges. Well, there's been a big effect in the book-selling industry itself, which affects us. But we had a very good year last year, partly because we did a book with a Hayao Miyazaki connection that did very well. But books are still being sold. Amazon is as aggressive as ever. Bookstores have figured out how to sell books to their customers, to their local customers. The industry has really adapted so that books are still available. What's changed is the bookstore has a community center. The bookstores have not been able to maintain a lot of their local connections. Many of them have had to close permanently. But a bunch of them have also figured out how to use the internet, Zoom meetings like this to develop not just a local community, but a much broader community. I think in the long run, this whole pandemic is devastating. It's been financially and socially to all of us. It has produced a lot of things that are going to evolve and stick. These meetings where you can get people from all over the world coming and for publishers and authors to be able to have these buy links set up so that people can listen to an author, click and buy their book right at the moment, is transforming for e-commerce. People don't have to travel around. They can do a lot of these events. They can do several a day at very, very low cost. It's just a commitment of time. Things like this are really going to stick. There have been many other changes too. But I mean, the pandemic has not been, I would not say it's been devastating to the publishing industry at all. That's good to hear. And there certainly is a silver lining. Even with this event today, we have people coming from all over the world. Fred, I think you wanted to read something and now might be a good time because it seems like the questions are starting to pop up in the chat. The first one I think might go nicely or dovetail nicely after your reading. I know I don't have a lot of time, so I'll try and make it a little shorter than I had originally. I'd like to share just an image on the screen and I'll spare it. Is it visible? Yes. Here we go. This is an excerpt. If you want to read the whole thing, you have to get the button. This is called The Metaphysical Can Opener. It's a chapter I wrote. And it says, I first met Mori Masahiro in the spring of 1986 when interviewing scientists for my book called Inside the Robot Kingdom, Japan Mechatronics and the Coming Robotopia. Mori's focus was on robots and Buddhism, which seemed novel combination to me at the time. In researching robots, Mori had found that he had to understand not only the human body's individual parts and their functions, but the relationship to the entire human body and the universe in which it exists. And this had brought him to Buddhism, which teaches that the Buddha nature is in all things, not just sentient beings, and is where, according to his interpretation, parts of whole systems are simultaneously independent and connected, that a universe and the source of all truth can exist in a single petal of a flower. Only a few years earlier, a book of his essays had been translated and published in English with the provocative title of The Buddha in the Robot, a Robot Engineer's Thoughts on Science and Religion. Mori, today, a 92-year-old with a razor-sharp mind, is a longtime student of Buddhism, especially the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism, which delights in shaking rigid human minds with riddles and paradoxes that thus allowing new truths to emerge and lead us to enlighten. In a more immediate sense, Mori's main goal in using Buddhism has been to stimulate creative thinking to get people to think outside the box. It is, he might say, a type of applied Buddhism. Always smiling in the course of our 1986 interview, he pulled out an ordinary permanent ink magic marker and lit it with a lighter. Whereupon, he announced with delight, see, it's not a marker, it's really a lamp. It was only one of many intellectual tricks he played with ordinary objects in his office to try to get me to perceive things differently. More provocatively, he stated that to learn the Buddhist way is to perceive oneself as a robot, and that, conversely, to learn the robot is to learn Buddhism. Paraphrasing the 13th century Syltelzen Mastery Dogen, he noted, to learn the Buddhist way is to learn about oneself, to learn about oneself is to forget oneself, to forget oneself is to perceive oneself as all things. To realize this is to cast off the body and mind of self and others. Buddhism aside, a Mori may be most famous for a concept he introduced in 1970 in a provocative essay titled Bukiminotani, or the Uncanny Valley. He questioned the wisdom of making robots too lifelike and illustrated his theory with a rising graph that has a sharp valley-like dip in the middle before rising again. Going up what might be called the affinity curve as machines become more identifiably lifelike. We feel closer to them, but just before a robot becomes a near-perfect replica of man at the stage of wax dolls or android machines, the level of familiarity plunges and changes to a sense of the uncanny. Mori is cautioning future roboticists to avoid having their designs fall into this uncanny valley because humans will always feel closer to a robot slightly different from man and a little more robot-like. 33 years after meeting Professor Mori, I went to see a heart suitor robot at the 400-year-old Kodaiji Temple complex in Kyoto, part of the Dingsai sect of Zen Buddhism. Mori had no connection to the robot itself, but in several surprising ways it seemed to illustrate his theories. At the temple, Avalokiteshvara, known as Kanno, the goddess of compassion in Japan, and the narrator in the heart sutra, was displayed in an intimate-sized hall on a sprawling temple grounds. As a pamphlet said, Avalokiteshvara is the bodhisattva of compassion and salvation and can change into a variety of shapes for those seeking help. Today, in a world of technological development and increased psychological and material well-being, Avalokiteshvara has been revealed on the grounds of Kyoto's Kodaiji Temple as the android Kanno Mindar for the many people who are still suffering. The Kodaiji Mindar robot was designed to be a modern bodhisattva staff statue that can be worshiped, and that is where Professor Mori's uncanny valley comes into play. When I visited Kodaiji, I found that the mindar's robot's head and hands were indeed android-in appearance, covered with a highly realistic skin and looking entirely human. Yet in a seeming concession to Mori's theory of the uncanny valley, the robot's arms and chest were skeletal, with servomotors and wires all exposed. The lower torso was only represented abstractly, as the robot is stationary and does not move about the hall. It only moves its head, face, hands, and upper torso to a limited extent. The head was hairless in the face, the most detailed aspect of the robot, had eyes that blinked and moved and seemed uncannily real. After a short introduction, the show started. The robot's hands moved about in the air, but in a simplified way, in the sense that the fingers were not articulated. When the robot put his or her hands together, as if in prayer, they looked most realistic. The tone of speech was pleasant and natural, with only a slight machine quality to it. Japanese speech is normally highly gender-specific, but this voice seemed gender-neutral, perhaps because, while the robot head itself looked vaguely feminine, it spoke matter of factly, like a Japanese male. Facial expressions and movements closely corresponded to the language used. The show lasted about 25 minutes. As the robot spoke, images were projected on the wall behind, showing both abstract cosmic scenes as well as realistic scenes from nature, calligraphic images of the Shuan Zhan heart suitor itself, and even scenes of a virtual audience. Instead of merely reciting the heart suitor, the robot focused on an explanation of its enigmatic ku or kong emptiness concept. In response, members of the virtual human audience projected on the wall, who struggled to understand the seeming contradictions of emptiness. Post-probing questions, the robot, in the role of a celestial bodhisattva, in this case a kanon or god, thus of mercy, gave explanation. No fancy AI or facial recognition technologies were employed to react with the real audience in the room. The robot was giving a repeatable, programmable sermon on the heart suitor, and for any non-Japanese in the audience, projection mapping provided English and Chinese translations on the wall. There were clearly technological and artistic challenges in creating the robot in its installation, which reportedly cost the temple nearly a million dollars. Not the least of these was finessing the uncanny valley curve, made extra complicated because, while quasi-human informed, as an amorphous deity and object of worship this robot was not supposed to look too human in the first place. Writing the robot's sermon may have been even more difficult than designing the robot. At the temple I met one of a team of three scenario writers who worked on it, a Rinzai sect priest named Honda Dorio. He later told me that they particularly struggled with two things. The first was the sutras always difficult, but key concept of emptiness. They had originally intended to focus on that in a faithful, easy-to-understand format, but this did not work because of its complexity and the fact that the compressed sutra itself does not expressly detailed the benefits that a true understanding of emptiness can create in believers. They therefore had the android focus on how an understanding of the sutra can bring about compassion. The second issue was how to justify using an android robot for the sermon, since sermons are normally given by human priests. The solution was to have a dialogue with the virtual audience, led by the robot, that encouraged the real audience to think about what it means to be human and about the difference between robots and humans, to think about what humans have that robots don't. One solution, Honda says, was to concentrate on what is in Japanese called bono, from the Sanskrit klesha, the mental defilements such as greed, hatred, delusion, and other destructive states of mind that cause suffering, for which we humans seem to have an infinite capacity. As he put it, by understanding the concept of emptiness, we can empathize with others' emotions and grow closer to them. We can wish for their happiness and as a result, we ourselves can become happy as well as just unshare this. Thank you. That was actually my favorite chapter. That and the afterward, which I thought was intimate. Oh, that's so sweet. This one thing I love about writing books is that, you know, sometimes the books touch people in unexpected ways. That gives me a lot of pleasure. Thank you. Why don't we start taking some questions? Don, would you like to ask your question directly, or would you like me to read it? Oh, I see it here. Is this the one about Alex Kerr's book, Don? Hello? I'm not sure. He's muted. Yeah, I think that's the one that you wanted to question. I'm sorry, can you hear me now? Yeah, was that the one? Yeah, I guess I inadvertently muted myself. Anyway, I suspect you've been asked this question before, but have you read Alex Kerr's Finding the Heart Sutra? I've read My Heart Sutra, your book, but not Alex's book. If you have read it, how do the books compare? And is it just a coincidence that they're both published about the same time? You know, I haven't read it yet. I plan to. I think I may have a digital copy that I haven't read yet. It was actually quite a shock to me that to find out that somebody else was writing a book about the heart sutra at the same time as I was, and they also, both of them came out within a two months period of time, almost at the exact same time. Yeah, we didn't actually find out that Alex's book was coming out until we were, your book had been announced. It was designed, everything was all underway, and it was several months after that that we found out about it. And I think that book was supposed to have been released earlier, had been delayed or something. So our book ended up coming out a bit before his. And I think it was only available in England, and maybe that's why we didn't see it. Yeah, and the author is a very well known writer in Japan. He lives in Kyoto. He's especially known for his work in preserving old Japanese, antique Japanese houses. And I'm sure it's a wonderful book. When I read about it, I was kind of amazed because I thought, well, it sounds quite similar to my book. I think it's quite different. I know that Lee-Ann Martin is also a writer. She wrote a review for both books for the Kyoto Journal, and liked both of them. So I'm sure his book is also very interesting, and I look forward to reading, but I didn't know anything about it until, you know, just before we were ready about the printer. I have to say that I know both Fred Schott and Alex Kerr, and if they both approach the heart sutra at the same moment, the stories will be completely different. Well, I look forward to meeting him someday, because obviously we have a similar interest in calling. And other questions here? Yeah, there's another question by Fred. Ah, Fred. Which Fred? Fred Dice. Oh, Fred Dice. Yeah, both Fred's today. I feel like they're my brothers, so I'm honored that they're on this session. And what is the question? Fred, are you there? Yeah, I'm here. No, the other friend. Oh, the other friend. Fred Dice, are you there? Hello? He's an Amsterdam. Well, maybe he'll come back later. Maybe we should move to another question. I think he maybe moved. He somehow left the room. Okay, well, let's read his question aloud. He says, when you say sutra in the Netherlands, people hear wisdom and stop listening, let alone reading. Fred, do you recognize this miscommunication? Yeah, I don't, I mean, oh yeah, I read the recipes. I'm sorry. So Fred, do you recognize this miscommunication? And Peter, do you experience this problem in your relations with European publishers? Who goes first? Me, I guess. Okay. Well, when you say sutra in the Netherlands, people hear wisdom. Well, that's a good thing, I would say, if they hear wisdom. That's right on target. I mean, it's about the perfection of wisdom. That is, that's what it's all about. That's the title of the sutra. It's the perfection of wisdom. Yeah. So if they hear that in the Netherlands, that's great. I wish people would hear that in North America and other countries as well. The fact that they stop listening and stop reading too, that's kind of disconcerting. Peter, do you have any comments on that? Well, I mean, just inferring from the question, it sounds like the word sutra equals wisdom, suggests that it's a particular genre of book that doesn't have a very, that's not held in very high regard, like kind of a new agey woo-woo sort of book that just kind of approaches these things superficially with the idea of just making your life happy, as opposed to kind of digging in depth and doing the serious work of spiritual growth. I've never run into that prejudice myself, but I do know that there are a bunch of publishers in Europe that specialize in new age books that are for a very particular market that goes along with crystals and ESP and astrology and stuff like that. I don't know if that's what he's referring to. I certainly think that if they associated sutra with wisdom, that's a wonderful thing because in English, usually the official translation of the heart sutra is the heart of the perfection of wisdom sutra. So what could be better? I see he qualified his remark, meaning eastern wisdom, like the heart Krishna. Well, yeah, if people tie it to Hari Krishna and that sort of thing that I could see where their eyes would glaze over, they would run the opposite direction. I don't know how much you can do about that. One thing I really tried to do in the book, because I think there are people in America too who probably think, well, something about religion, I'll just stay away from that. One thing I really tried to do is make it more of an exploration, a personal exploration. I don't pretend to know everything about the heart sutra and I'm certainly not a practitioner, a Buddhist in any sense. I don't get up at five in the morning and meditate for an hour. I don't do anything like that. So this is sort of a view of a religious text that has become ubiquitous in East Asia and it's my attempt to sort of figure out through other voices really, other people, why it's so popular and also the interesting ways in which it is used and what it means to people in East Asia. So I really try really hard not to, you know, be too pedantic about it. I don't want to be a guru or anything like that, but I can understand why some people would sort of shy away from maybe a subject like this because I can understand completely a lot of stuff in Buddhism like any religion. It's kind of like mumbo jumbo even to me. This is just my attempt to find out why this has so much meaning to me personally. And I think that's why your book is so readable is that it really is like a conversation. I mean, there's so much personal revelation in the book that I don't want to say the subject matter is irrelevant, but it's really more of an exploration of how your mind works and your experience and so it's nice. It works. Yeah. Well, I feel like I should send you a check too, but I don't have any checks. Maybe I can send chocolates. Mayim, I hope I'm saying that right. Would you like to comment directly to Fred? Sure. Thank you. This is great listening to you guys. And I have the pleasure of knowing Peter. I hope to meet you sometime, Fred. I have heard of you as an interpreter and translator. I love telling friends in Japan how much interest there is in Buddhism in the U.S. And often they're so surprised because so many Japanese temples just struggle to find any relevancy to their surrounding communities. Do you have any thoughts of publishing in Japanese? You could translate yourself or write it yourself. I think you love it. I always wonder why my books are usually not translated into Japanese, but for whatever reason they don't seem to be. I would love to have several of them translated into Japanese. It just hasn't happened. I don't know why. I really don't know why. I would think that there might be a market for this in Japan, but I don't know how you go about that. We'll see. Maybe it'll happen. Maybe some publisher in Japan will want to publish it. That would be great. Don't you still have connections with publishers in Japan? We can help Fred out here. Sure. Actually, some of our books have been translated into Japanese. It's just not Fred's books. One of them has. Yeah, that's right. Dreamland Japan. But it's difficult. It's often difficult to interest Japanese publishers in things. Maybe we're not... There's such a difference. When I was at Toggle, especially, we would get books that basically had been translated from the Japanese kind of verbatim. Not that they were banned translations, but there's no attempt to adjust the content to a readership that wasn't familiar with a lot of the cultural and historical underpinning that all Japanese readers would know. That's one of the jobs of people who work in this area is to make these translations, fiction or nonfiction, accessible to Western readers. That usually involves cutting out a bunch of stuff and adding a bunch of stuff. I suppose the same thing is true in reverse. If you think about books written about Japan for a Western audience being translated in Japanese, there's so much stuff that might be in there that would be either irrelevant or already known or just getting the way of understanding of a Japanese person to read the book. It probably might be presented as a bit of a curiosity. Kind of like, look what they think about us, sort of book as opposed to real content. I mean, there's tons of books that are translated from English into Japanese much more than the other way around, but not necessarily books about Japan, unless they're, say, historical works, books of people who are something like that. Especially if they're books that make a lot of money in the United States. Well, I mean, that always attracts the attention of the agents. If the book has not sold really well in the US, it's very, very difficult to get any Japanese publisher interested in it. And my books have always been real labors of love. And ironically, I think one of the one of the obstacles to getting published in Japan is that I often write things about things in Japan or related to Japan that most Japanese have never heard of. So the heart center is probably an exception. Maybe there's hope for this book. We'll see. Thank you. Does anyone have any other questions that they'd like to address? Fred, any plans for, you mentioned that you had some ideas for books, writing books in the future. Any plans for a next book? For a next book? Do you have, are you planning to write another book? You promised you said this was the last. Yeah, every book I say it's the last. This is true. I swear to all the agencies. After I finish a book, I always say it's the last. I'll never write another one because it's a labor of love and it takes a lot out of me. As you know, Don, it's just very, very consuming, which is not to say that I don't love the subjects. And I do have some ideas for books which actually came to me quite quickly after I finished this first book. And I'm just trying to figure out, you know, because I've always worked with Peter and I'm thinking, well, the things I'm thinking about don't have much to do with Asia or Japan. What am I going to do? But I do have some ideas. One is actually my father's stories from World War II and another one I wouldn't mind writing about would be some of my own experiences hitchhiking. Interesting. Maybe that one I could fit in a Japanese angle somehow. I don't know. I don't know. But you know, it's books are, they're a labor of love for me. I don't do this to get rich. It's a huge investment. And I'm just grateful to be able to do it. And I'm very lucky to be able to do it. And I'm very thankful to Peter. Okay, thank you. Trisha. Fred, I'd like to ask you that old chestnut of a question. How, what is your process with writing? For example, morning before everyone's awakened, or do you do it at three in the morning? You know, as I was a journalist, my whole career, and I'm now retired, and I feel like it's time for me to write a book, but I just, you know, I'm interested to know the process you go through. I'm not talking so much about the ideation, but the idea, how do you actually execute it? I have no advice to give anybody on that. But I encourage you to write a book. It's always good. It's good karma to write a book. I really can't give advice to people because, as I mentioned earlier, I actually made my living for 30, 40 years now as an interpreter and also a translator, a written translator. So my, you know, my schedule, I always have to give priority to those things because that's what keeps me alive. And I just write whenever I can. And I think I've been blessed in another regard that way is because usually what's happened with the books I've done for Peter is I say, Peter, I've got this idea. And then he says, that's great. You know, and then it takes like years. I get to be an outline and then he says, oh, let's do it. And then a few more years and then, oh, okay, we'll do it. And then I start writing and then eventually, eventually I finish. And at some point there must be a deadline that emerges. But Peter has always been very understanding of my situation. And for that too, I'm very grateful. But I don't get up if I have to write. I don't do that. I just write when I have time, you know, and my life has never been structured because I've been a freelance for all my life. So I, you know, I don't have the luxury of just writing all the time. But one thing nice about interpreting in particular is that you go out, you do the job, you come back, it's done. And then you have a lot of time. And sometimes in a pandemic, for example, immediately the interpreting market is dead as a doornail for quite a long time. And suddenly you have a lot more time as the vehicle knows. So, you know, a pandemic is not a bad time to write a book. Thank you. Does anyone have any other questions or comments or just want to say hi to Fred or Peter before we call it a day? I just have one more question about the award that the Japanese government gave Fred. I can't remember the title of the award, but can you say something about how that happened? It's great. I'm so happy that you received such a distinguished award. But can you tell us how that came to me? Well, there's I guess several reasons. I guess they liked the work that I had done. And it's mainly for promoting Japanese pop culture in North America, but also includes not only writing, but interpreting and translating, especially my work in manga. And I think a lot of these things are related to timing. I mean, this is Zena, the people who could have won this award that year. But I believe that Osvaldo Carrol was the prime minister that year. And he has a big manga, or he was a big manga. He still is. He's a big manga otaku. So the Japanese government was, I think, trying to think of, you know, maybe need to move a little bit away from tea ceremony and language learning and traditional arts and crafts and focus on soft power, anime, manga. And I think I was quite lucky in that sense, the timing was right. They were looking for somebody in that direction. And some very kind people recommended me. And it was a wonderful award to get. And I also won the Japan Foundation Award a few years ago. And that was amazing too, because with the Japan Foundation Award, I actually got to meet the man who is currently the emperor of Japan. So I had a little audience with the crown prince and his wife, Masako. And that was a lot of fun too. That was a wonderful award too. Great. So I'm very lucky, I think, in terms of timing, because when my first book came out on manga, nobody in Japan would have wanted to even mention it in the government at least, and higher levels of the authorities on the cultural arbiters or whatever, as Peter mentioned. Also, a lot of it's timing. I'm just very lucky. I've actually been lucky my whole life. I feel very lucky just to be here right now. Very lucky. Thank you. Well, thank you so much, both of you, for coming. I do want to point out that the Mechanics Institute has several of Fred's books in our collection. My heart sutra has not yet been added, although we have a copy of it, just because of the pandemic. Quite honestly, we are not cataloging as many books as we normally would, but very soon it will be added to the collection. And we do have other Stonebridge Press published books as well. So I've included in the chat space the links to Stonebridge Press, so if you can buy Fred's book directly, if you like, and the links to the Mechanics Institute as well. If you're a member with us, you can, we have a circulation service that goes on right now. You can check out books, and you can order books through the staff, and we'll have it ready for you. And we hope to reopen soon, but no news on that front. Meanwhile, Fred's website is www.ja2.com, and that is also a fun place to check out on the web. Any last questions before we say thanks, Fred and Peter, and call it a day? Yes, I have a quick question for Oh, hi Amy. Hi. Nice seeing you again. Yes, my relative. So I have a quick question. So like you said, your book is a product of love, much time and effort was put into it. Was it difficult for you to express everything you wanted to say again? And because usually when you have something you're very interested in, you have a lot to write, and it's sometimes difficult to, you know, put everything you want to put in into a book. I also attended to Mr. Frederick Green's presentation a few months ago on translation of Shushi's book. That's right. Yes. And I was very interested on how Shushi was like expressed his emotions and how he wanted to talk about the story. So was it for you, was it difficult for you to like express what you wanted to like explain or tell the audience? Yeah, I always find that one of the hardest parts in writing the book is to figure out what you want to include. And you always find out that there's, you want to include more than you possibly can. So there's always this point where you have to say, well, this is as much as I can say about this, and this is as much as I can say about that, and you have to be quite strict. That is a challenge. And I should mention that Fred Green is on the screen here. He translated a wonderful series of short stories by my wife's father, who's a very famous novelist in mainland China before and during and after the war, in Shushi. And the book is called Bird Talk and Other Stories. Right? Right? And that's right. And Peter, of course, published it. Peter did such a wonderful, wonderful job with the cover design and the book design. And, you know, And he did a fabulous translation. Well, anyway. And Fia's dad did such a wonderful job writing those short stories with her space. And, you know, Tricia, you had asked earlier about, you know, how to write a book. I thought the best thing that Peter ever did was to give me a deadline. Because I had been working on this for years and years and years and I could have worked on it for years and years. But that deadline is always what makes the big difference. So thank you, Peter. You were patient, but at the same time, at some point you said it's got to be done. You get a deadline because I get a deadline from the distributors, and they get really unhappy if I don't get the book to them on time. So it's all just passed down from the big whatever sits at the top of the food chain. But thank everybody for coming. I think we've blown through our timeline here, but it's been a lot of fun for me. And thank you to Brother Fred's and Amy and C.J. Suzuki and Don and Trish and everyone. And I'm, I see you disappearing. Yeah, thanks for me too. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, thank you so much. All right. Stay safe, everyone. Stay well. And I will send you the video in a couple of days. Thanks so much. And I look forward to seeing you in the flesh or virtually. And thank you, Taren. You're welcome. You've always been great. Thank you. All right, Mike, two minutes. All right. Bye-bye.