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A sit-in by visa violators and their families entered its second day Tuesday in front of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau with protesters seeking government good will. The action at the bureau in Minato Ward is being organized by the Asian People’s Friendship Society, ...
Kazuhiro Shiraishi, 66, is a guest-house manager in the Izu-kogen Highlands, a famous resort area on the Izu Peninsula of Shizuoka Prefecture. Looking out onto the Pacific Ocean, and just 90 minutes by train from Tokyo, Izu has a warm climate all year round ...
“I was stopped by two men in a government-registered vehicle, blindfolded and dragged off the street. They took me away to a house in a place I did not know. I was forced into a room with blood all over the walls and floor, ...
Takashi Miike's blood-soaked vengeance tale, one of two Japanese films being shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, draws the biggest boos so far, with critics savaging it as overacted and cliched.
Have you ever given your best effort while striving to achieve something but felt like what you were doing was futile? That’s the feeling I’m getting about Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Olympics. With just over three months to go until the IOC ...
Sigmar Polke has a lot in common with the medieval alchemists with whom he identifies. Like them, he is interested in transmutation, sometimes employing pigments and techniques that make his paintings change over time. Like those pseudo-scientists of the past, he uses a combination ...
One of my favorite paintings is one by a trained elephant that I picked up on holiday in Thailand daubed by a trained elephant. It’s not a very good one, but the story behind it makes it special — highlighting one of the aspects ...
As standards of history teaching are supposed to be falling around the world, it might be worth trying to captue the imagination of students of world history by presenting much of it in terms of romantic sounding trade routes. This approach has clearly paid ...
Some Westerners, when faced with Oriental creativity, have a tendency to gush. Instead of taking a calm, rational, inquisitive point of view, they tend to ascribe the aesthetic effect of what they see to some mysterious, spiritual force — whether they call it Zen, ...
The name Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) invariably invokes a legend — the legend of a wild, creative genius, out of sync with the stilted, repressive atmosphere of Victorian Europe; who exploded in passionate art and self-destructive disregard of the banal parameters of everyday life; ...
Most great artists are instantly recognizable. As soon as you see one of their works, you know that it can’t be by anyone else. If this is truly the mark of a great artist, then Georges de La Tour (1593-1652) must be among the ...
Visitors to the current exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo might be excused for thinking they’d been misled. Instead of encountering a display of works expressing the essence of 20th-century Japanese art, perchance, or the challenge of assimilating Western artistic ...
The quintessential Japanese aesthetic is that of wabi sabi, a beauty associated with things that are simple, rustic, unpolished or even plain rundown. It is perhaps surprising, then, that this aesthetic is so little in evidence at an extensive exhibition at the Tokyo National ...
In the mid-19th century, the French village of Barbizon was the artistic equivalent of the reality-TV show “Big Brother.” In this tiny village with a population of just 352 (according to the 1872 census), the locals were under constant observation by the 100 or ...
No artist’s life and work — not even Picasso’s — better represents the modern history of Spain than that of Joan Miro (1893-1983), whose early work from 1918 to 1945 is now on display at the Setagaya Art Museum. During Miro’s lifetime, his homeland ...
With the sweltering heat of summer now upon us, you could do worse than escape into the Suntory Museum in Akasaka to visit its exhibition of glass art. There is something particularly cooling about looking at these 142 exhibits, which range from a fragment ...
Next year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Vincent van Gogh, popularly regarded in Japan (as elsewhere) as the quintessential artist. Unfortunately, it will be difficult for Japanese galleries to borrow works from abroad to celebrate this event, with insurance costs now ...