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 Cameron Allan Mckean

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Cameron Allan Mckean
Cameron Allan McKean is a culture editor and staff writer at The Japan Times. He writes about contemporary art, folk crafts and disasters in Japan.
For Cameron Allan Mckean's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Mar 3, 2018
The color of climate change in Japan's Yaeyama archipelago
Depleting reefs may profoundly reshape Ishigaki Island's tourism industry.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Jul 15, 2017
Kamiko: Growing paper clothes in rural Japan
A small community in Miyagi Prefecture is struggling to continue making one of its most-famous craft exports u2014 Shiroishi handmade paper and paper clothes
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design
May 12, 2017
Denim dreams: Dyeing to live in the industrial heart of Okayama
Hirohiko Sunami's hands emerge from his indigo vat covered in rivulets of fermenting natural dye. The light is dim in this Kojima workshop, but a few stray sunbeams reflect off the millions of bubbles at the vat's surface as Sunami pulls a piece of cotton from the dark liquid. "Look," he says. While we watch, the color seems to change as the dye oxidizes.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Nov 5, 2016
'Mr. Turtle': Yusaku Kitano's bizarre, award-winning novel about artificial intelligence
Mr. Turtle wants to borrow a Philip K. Dick novel from a local Japanese library. But "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" is on loan, so he borrows a book on "The Making of Blade Runner." This scene from Yusuke Kitano's award-winning sci-fi novel "Mr. Turtle" sums up its narrative strategy: Don't tell the story, tell the stories under the story.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 18, 2016
Sci-fi and fact at the Okayama Art Summit
The city of Okayama was flattened by incendiary bombs in 1945. Many people died, more than 12,000 homes were destroyed and Okayama's centuries-old wooden castle burned to its stone foundations. In 1966, the donjon was rebuilt with modern concrete, which was likely made in Mizushima — a smoke-spewing industrial site near Okayama that produced and refined the materials that helped pave over the physical scars of World War II.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jun 16, 2015
Nissan award echoes a maturing art world
The biennial Nissan Art Award isn't new now, and it wasn't really new when it began in 2013, either — something Nissan President and CEO Carlos Ghosn is fully aware of.
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design
Jun 6, 2015
Refusing to check out of the Hotel Okura
With the iconic landmark poised to close for renovation in August, we explore its significance to the development of modernist architecture in Tokyo.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jun 4, 2015
Curator Okwui Enwezor tackles grim realities at Venice Biennale, while Japan sticks to tired festival formula
Ugly, joyless, aggressive, didactic, morose, self-righteous, unpleasant; these are just some of the words used in the press to describe the recently opened 56th Venice Biennale in Italy.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Apr 18, 2015
'At Kasetsu' and the poetry of everyday life in temporary housing
Four years have passed since the evacuees displaced by the Fukushima nuclear disaster moved into kasetsu (temporary housing). Many are unable to return home as their houses are still contaminated.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Apr 11, 2015
'The SAGE Handbook of Modern Japanese Studies' examines when modern Japan began
The first chapter in this dense collection of Anglophone academia asks, "How and when did modern Japan begin?" Editor James D. Babb, a lecturer in politics at the University of Newcastle, has collated a selection of texts that address this question, many of which grapple with the ostensibly inscrutable state of present-day Japan.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Apr 4, 2015
'Encore! The New Artisans' is a visual bible of decorative, sometimes gimmicky crafts
Craft, writes author Olivier Dupon, "is no longer a trend; it is at last enshrined in contemporary life."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Mar 7, 2015
Memories of Mount Qilai: The Education of a Young Poet
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Jan 10, 2015
Code + culture: New Internet artists from Japan
If the Internet is an ocean, why do we spend so much time floating on its surface? What's really going on down there? Not just in the deepest, darkest trenches, but among the forgotten protocols, faulty algorithms and emerging parameters outside the busy shipping lanes and far from the crowded life rafts of Facebook and Twitter.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 28, 2014
The Goude, the bad and the ugly
On Aug. 15, 1977, an issue of New York Magazine was released with an image of Jamaican singer and model Grace Jones on the cover: She is almost naked, standing on one very long leg; her oil-coated torso twisting to face the camera, with one hand lightly holding a microphone and the other effortlessly stretching out to touch her other leg, bent impossibly backward.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jul 17, 2014
Ryuichi Sakamoto delves into cities and nature at Sapporo International Art Festival
Sapporo is generally known for three things: snow, ramen and beer. These things, and festivals such as the Snow Festival or City Jazz, are what draw more than 14 million tourists to the city every year.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 29, 2014
Tropfest gives Japan a peek at Australia
The homegrown Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia will have competition for eyeballs this year as Australia's Tropfest descends on Japan. The event claims — perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek — to be the "world's largest short-film festival."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 15, 2014
Short-film festival holds Tokyo edition
Short-film fever is hitting Tokyo this month, with festivals planned in arty-nooks and cinema-crannies across the capital. But not all short-film festivals are created equal — the good ones are both cleverly curated and take daring approaches in how they screen films.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Apr 21, 2014
Artists' mission to revitalize an onsen town
It begins with a long, slow hiss. The valves open, and a thick fog is released into the air, pouring from the roof of Dogo Onsen Honkan, the famous three-tiered bathhouse built in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture, in 1894. It flows down the side of the building, past bathers in bathrobes on the open balcony and begins to settle on the ground.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Apr 14, 2014
Nakako Hayashi's delicate war against big fashion
The world's garments might be made in factories, but fashion is made in the media. In an age when trends coalesce and melt away in the time it takes to put a "#" in front of a keyword, an age when fashion has the potential to be more democratic and idiosyncratic than ever, isn't it strange then, that so much power is still held by monolithic, archaic magazines?
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design
Feb 10, 2014
Japan's leather industry, almost as tough as old boots
In his east Tokyo workshop, across the Sumida river from Asakusa Station, Katsuhiko Nakano is surrounded on all sides by bags and tools. He is one of the few leather craftsmen in the city who makes goods by hand.

Longform

A statue of "Dragon Ball" character Goku stands outside the offices of Bandai Namco in Tokyo. The figure is now as recognizable as such characters as Mickey Mouse and Spider-Man.
Akira Toriyama's gift to the world