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Farmers in the city of Tamura, Fukushima Prefecture, have begun planting rice in a district once designated a no-go zone because of radioactive fallout ejected by the disaster-hit Fukushima No. 1 power plant.
Recently I was asked to write a blurb for a new liquid plant-nutrient. As soon as I saw the name of the product, 早根早起 （Hayane Hayaoki), I smiled at this example of linguistic creativity.
Life in Japan just seems tailor-made for certain foreign residents, who slip into the fabric of this society as smoothly as a hand slides into a glove. American Curtis Patterson, a professional koto player and music teacher, is a case in point. Not only ...
Denmark’s Emmelie de Forest won this year’s Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday night with her ethno-inspired flute and drum tune “Only Teardrops,” despite tough competition from spectacular stage shows by performers from Azerbaijan and Ukraine. Juries and television viewers across Europe awarded the barefoot, ...
One team’s quest for a first title has ended. The other team’s fight will continue next season. The Yokohama B-Corsairs outplayed the Rizing Fukuoka in Sunday’s bj-league championship game, controlling the tempo for larger stretches and making enough timely baskets to fill an instructional ...
For C. B. Liddell's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
When you first encounter the sculptures of Koji Tanada, you might get the initial impression that he’s being facetious or whimsical, and assume that his sculptures are all part of an elaborate practical joke, designed to drive home some droll but not very profound ...
Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura Closes March 16 Who hasn’t taken pleasure looking at clouds and imagining shapes and forms in their billowy masses? The late-career paintings of Kiyoshi Nakagami, on display at a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura (www.moma.pref.kanagawa.jp) ...
How valid is the distinction between crafts and arts? A number of recent exhibitions, most notably “Roppongi Crossing” at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum and “Space for Your Future” at the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Tokyo, have confronted us with this question, one that is ...
Because of strong pressures to belong and conform in Japanese society, the country can be a difficult place for those otherwise inclined. One reaction to this is the hikikomori phenomenon, in which chiefly young males reduce contact with society to a minimum by staying ...
It might sound a corny to say that artists live through their works, but in the case of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), whose lengthy life story is mired in muddles, myths and myriad name changes, it is his art that speaks with the clearest voice ...
Nationalism — especially in the Japanese context — routinely gets a bad press. Just the word seems to call forth visions of braying sound trucks, surly permed fellows in jump suits, and seedy revisionist historians with axes to grind or ungrind. But nationalism can ...
When it comes to giving us a handle on the world we live in, science no longer cuts it. In its latest incarnations — superstring and M-theory — it postulates 10, 11 or even more dimensions, only three or four of which we can ...
Ikuo Hirayama clearly represents how the Japanese like to see — and project — themselves. His paintings, located in the strong traditions of nihonga (Japanese-style painting), are unmistakably Japanese, but they look outwards to the rest of the world and express the spirit of ...
One reason the Sistine Chapel in Rome is so venerated is that it represents one of the occasions when art did not lose out to religion when the two came together. Though religious constraints sometimes force artists to rise to the occasion — as ...
Light can have a strong effect on people — about 5 percent of the world’s population is reckoned to suffer from a form of depression called seasonal affective disorder (SAD), which has been linked to sunlight deprivation. Light also affects us in lots of ...
Teatrine Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura Closes in 21 days Katsuhiro Yamaguchi is a quintessential, 20th-century multimedia artist. Unlike great painters, who frequently share artistic characteristics with other painters, great multimedia artists plow lonelier furrows that haven’t been plowed before — and then quickly ...
Most of the action in the art world takes place out of the public eye in small, discreet galleries like the one run and owned by Noriko Togo, catering to the sophisticated tastes of a well-heeled clientele. Togo shows me around her gallery’s latest ...