The death toll from a blizzard that hit Hokkaido and the Tohoku region over the weekend has risen to nine, local police said Monday. The latest fatality as of Monday was Kuniko Jingi, 76, who was found collapsed under the snow on a road ...
Sleeping in. Breakfast in bed. Sunny brunches. Strolls in the park. Laid-back afternoon tea. Cocktails at sunset. Decadent late nights. Saturday — the word brings to mind a flurry of images associated with the first day of the weekend and the chances are, they ...
For the past year, Tokyo sixth-grader Manami has had dinner at home an average of four times a week. The rest of the time she has had to make do with a juku-ben, a boxed dinner prepared by her mother and consumed between classes ...
SELLING WOMEN: Prostitution, Markets and the Household in Early Modern Japan, by Amy Stanley. University of California Press, 2012, 282 pp., $49.95 (hardcover) In the vast cultural landscape, Japan fascinates the mainstream with manga and anime, the martial arts, Zen and kimono. Of course, ...
Cuba overpowers China, winning 12-0 and advancing to the second round of the World Baseball Classic.
Here’s a confession: I’m not a big reader of manga, including the many that have been made into Japanese films. Given the limited amount of reading time I have left on Earth, I’d rather spend it with Proust than “Gantz.” So sue me. One ...
When Hayabusa, a Japanese satellite sent to collect soil samples from a distant asteroid, returned safely to Earth in June 2010, many Japanese felt an excitement and pride more akin to a World Cup win than an event that, abroad, was a one-day news ...
The recent spate of Japanese family dramas by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hirokazu Koreeda, Shinya Tsukamoto, Yuya Ishii and other indie directors has produced much outstanding work, but the on-screen alienation can be depressing, to be honest. The housewives (almost never career women) in these films ...
Kaho Minami has had a busy and varied career as an actress since her 1985 debut in Kohei Oguri’s “Kayako no Tameni” (“For Kayoko”). In addition to appearing in everything from commercial hits (Takashi Miike’s “Yokai Daisenso [The Great Yokai War],” 2005) to films ...
Once considered a fad consigned to the dustbin of Hollywood history, 3-D now looks about as likely to fade away as color and sound. It’s waning with the box-office failure of crappy conversions from 2-D, yes, but the six 3-D films that have grossed ...
Naomi Kawase is the most lyrical of Japanese directors now working. As both a documentarian and a feature filmmaker, she discovers in the common materials of everyday existence — sun, wind, water, trees, insects, people — a beauty and transcendence that is always present, ...
The conventional Japanese World War II movie is something of a paradox. Usually set in the war’s closing days and after (I’ve heard Emperor Showa’s surrender statement so many times now I could recite it in my sleep), with a pacifist message implicit or ...
Movies about single guys who become suddenly burdened with the responsibilities of parenthood, whether from Hollywood (“Three Men and a Baby”) or Japan (the underrated “Yukai Rapusodi [Accidental Kidnapper]“), follow a pattern set in stone: After rising to various patience- and character-testing occasions, the ...
Kaneto Shindo is, at 99, the oldest film director in Japan and, after Portugal’s centenarian Manoel de Oliveira, the world. As a scriptwriter active since the 1930s, he has worked on many commercial films, but as a director, starting in 1951 with “Aisai Monogatari ...
Every August, Japanese horror films appear in theaters here, cashing in on the traditional belief that chills from scary stories help beat the summer heat. And every August, critics lament that they don’t match up to the products of J-horror’s glory years — the ...
