 Harry S. Pariser was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in a small town in southwestern Pennsylvania. After graduating from Boston University with a B.S. in Public Communications in 1975, Harry hitched and camped his way through Europe, traveled down the Nile by steamer, and by train through Sudan. After visiting Uganda, Rwanda, and Tanzania, he traveled by passenger ship from Mombasa to Bombay, and then on through South and Southeast Asia before settling down in Kyoto, Japan, where he studied Japanese and ceramics while supporting himself by teaching English to everyone from tiny tots to Buddhist priests. Using Japan as a base, he returned to other parts of Asia: trekking to the vicinity of Mt. Everest in Nepal, taking tramp steamers to remote Indonesian islands like Adonara, Timor, Sulawesi, and Ternate, and visiting rural areas in China. He returned to the United States in 1984 from Kanazawa, Japan, via the Caribbean where he did research for his two travel guides: Guide to Jamaica and Guide to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands which were published in 1986. Returning to Japan in 1986, he lived in the city of Kagoshima--a city at the southern tip of Kyushu which lies across the bay from an active volcano. During that year and part of the next, he taught English and wrote numerous articles for The Japan Times. He currently lives in San Francisco. Besides traveling and writing his other pursuits include printmaking, painting, cooking, backpacking and hiking, photography, reading, and listening to music--especially jazz, salsa, calypso, and African pop. |
Last Updated: Wed, May 6, 1998