I was on my way to a screening of Tsutomu Hanabusa’s teen romcom “Koko Debut (High School Debut)” when the March 11 earthquake struck. Luckily, the Oedo subway train I was riding made it, slowly, to the next station and, instead of catching this ...

Hollywood screwball comedies have long been favorites of Japanese filmmakers, with many listing such genre masters as Frank Capra, Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder as influences. Screwball comedy heroines, however, are usually self-centered, hard-headed types, while the local feminine ideal on screen is still ...

Omnibus films must have a unifying theme, however loose or gimmicky; otherwise, they’re a collection of shorts. And while there’s nothing wrong with shorts as such, when packaged as a feature film, they are, as all distributors know, box-office suicide. “Kamifusen” (“Paper Balloon”), an ...

The third Okinawa International Movie Festival held its opening ceremony on Tues., March 22, after going through a traumatic week in Japan and coming out of it dramatically changed. In the wake of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, sponsor Yoshimoto Kogyo, an Osaka-based ...

The Japanese entertainment industry is reacting to the massive disaster caused by the March 11 earthquake much the way it reacts to any major national tragedy — by observing jishuku (self-restraint). In practice, this means putting public service, at least temporarily, ahead of profit. ...

Manzai acts — comedy duos consisting of a boke (goofball) and tsukkomi (straight man) — are ubiquitous on Japanese television, but the form has relatively few foreign fans. One big problem is the language barrier: Manzai-shi (manzai comics) typically spritz a mile a minute, ...

Rakugo, which might be described as traditional Japanese sit-down comedy, once had a certain snob appeal among foreigners here. If you could boast that your hobby was rakugo, as either a fan or participant, you were saying you had summited the Mount Fuji of ...

Japan is now a country with more dogs and cats (23 million in 2009) than children under 16 (17 million, same year). As both a parent and a dog owner here, I understand why: Kids are enormously expensive to raise in Japan and, given ...

Japanese mass-audience movies about the country’s military during World War II are usually melodramatic, sentimental or blatantly nationalistic. But their pure-hearted tokkotai (suicide squad) pilots flying to certain death are hardly representative of the typical Japanese soldier who, as the war entered its last, ...

The Japanese audience has long loved period dramas, including ones based on the lives of real people, generally men wearing topknots. And usually, at some point, the swords come out, as in the story of the 47 ronin (masterless samurai) who in 1703 attacked ...

The Japanese foodie movie is an offshoot of the gurume (gourmet) boom of the 1980s bubble years. Back then, urban trendies began exploring the farther reaches of French cuisine, expense be damned — or as Juzo Itami’s seminal foodie movie “Tampopo” (1985) comically examined, ...

Sion Sono is a self-confessed chameleon, who can switch effortlessly from the laugh-a-minute black comedy of 2008′s “Ai no Mukidashi (Love Exposure)” to the heartfelt medical melodrama of 2009′s “Chanto Tsutaeru (Be Sure to Share)” and the splatter shock of his latest, “Tsumetai Nettaigyo ...