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The head of an official inquiry into the deadly collapse of a Bangladesh factory complex said the building’s owner was the “main culprit” for the disaster because he violated construction codes. The cave-in of the eight-story Rana Plaza outside the capital last month killed ...
Throughout most of Japan, June is the rainy season. While all that rainfall is great for rice paddies so that we can have delicious new harvest rice in the fall, it makes it a rather dull month for seasonal produce: The summer’s bounty of ...
“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, ...
Claude Regy says the team at the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) threw him the “best birthday party ever” when he arrived in Japan just days after the actual May 1 occasion. The 90-year-old French director is hoping for an even better birthday gift, ...
As far as debuts go, Shohei Otani's delivered. The celebrated rookie pitched fairly well on Thursday night, and though he finished outside the decision, he left the mound with the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters well within striking distance of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows.
Contemporary Japanese films are often extremely violent; the lives of ordinary Japanese, much less so. According to a multinational study by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Japan’s homicide rate in 2009 was 0.4 per 100,000 population, for a total of ...
Rakugo, the ancient Japanese art of sit-down comedy, has inspired movies including Shinpei Hayashiya’s “Rakugo Monogatari (Rakugo Story)” (2010) and Hideyuki Hirayama’s “Shaberedomo Shaberedomo (Talk, Talk, Talk)” (2007), but Yuji Kanda’s “Tokyo Teyandei: The Story Teller’s Apprentice” (simply called “The Story Teller’s Apprentice” in ...
Director: Shinya Tsukamoto Language: Japanese (subtitled in English) Shinya Tsukamoto’s cyberpunk classics “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” and “Tetsuo 2: Body Hammer” are now available in a double-disc Blu-ray set, remastered from negatives and released by Third Window of the U.K. The set includes an ...
Why are so many Japanese sci-fi thrillers so sure our near-future rulers will try to tyrannize us, dehumanize us or, as in “Batoru Rowaiaru (Battle Royale),” make us slaughter each other, even when our only crime is possessing raging adolescent hormones? Given what I’ve ...
Miwa Nishikawa’s “Yume Uru Futari,” a blackly comic, unsparingly sharp drama about a couple who scam lonely single women with fake marriage offers to fund the building of their new izakaya pub — and how their deception comes back to bite them in unexpected ...
Director: Tetsuya Nakashima Language: Japanese (subtitled in English) Third Window Films of the U.K. has just slashed the price on its region B Blu-ray release of this tense psychological thriller, about a middle-school teacher (the icy, implacable Takako Matsu) who takes revenge on two ...
It’s rare indeed that I ever wished a new Japanese film were longer — and I am not the only one. “This could be shorter by (name your number) minutes” is such a cliche of Japanese film reviewing and commentary that I inwardly groan ...
Since its start in 2009, the Okinawa International Movie Festival has been more than its name implies. It has the usual competition sections: one called Laugh for comedies and another called Peace for dramas, though not all the films fit neatly into these two ...
Yonkoma manga, or four-cell gag comics, are popular here with both sexes and all ages, but they account for relatively few of the many hit live-action films made from manga. For one thing, it’s not so easy to string all those gags together into ...
Director: Sion Sono Language: Japanese (subtitled in English) Third Window Films of the U.K. has released a region B Blu-ray of “Ai no Mukidashi (Love Exposure),” Sion Sono’s 2008 four-hour black-comic epic about a pure-hearted Catholic (Takahiro Nishijima) who becomes an up-skirt photographer to ...
Donald Richie was my friend and mentor for more than 20 years and my inspiration before that. When I was preparing to come to Japan for the first time in 1975, I read many books about the place, but Donald’s masterpiece “The Inland Sea” ...
Plenty of Japanese directors make films about socially awkward or marginal guys: Given all the on-screen examples (as well as their many real-life inspirations), it seems that the onetime country of the samurai has become the land of the otaku and freeter (unemployed or ...