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Silvio Berlusconi has failed in his attempt to topple the Italian government, leaving him weaker than ever and zapping the aura of invincibility that has surrounded him for two decades as he faces the possible loss of his Senate seat and a ban from ...
Hatsudai has a lot going for it. This quiet low-rise residential neighborhood just minutes west of Shinjuku boasts a friendly traditional shōtengai (shopping street) and a lively annual Awa Odori dance festival. Now add to that a really outstanding restaurant. Anis opened in early ...
International events undermine Japan's democracy. Shame on the International Olympic Committee for being a party to it.
In the glitzy and gossipy world of Japanese celebrity, hardly a week goes by without revelations being made about — or made by — Ichikawa Ebizo XI. For years, the charismatic young star of the kabuki world has never long been out of the ...
Reigning champion Kei Nishikori made quick work of Feliciano Lopez, walloping the Spaniard in a straight-sets victory Thursday to reach the quarterfinals of the Rakuten Japan Open. The world No. 13 Nishikori needed little over an hour to put away Lopez, 7-6 (7-4), 6-0 ...
Japanese love mysteries, in print and on the screen, but foreigners, by and large, don’t take to Japanese mystery movies. For decades, Japanese producers were happy to concentrate on the big domestic market for local whodunit films, while making only half-hearted attempts to sell ...
Director: Hayao Miyazaki Language: Japanese (English subs/dub) Hayao Miyazaki’s 1992 anime “Kurenai no Buta (Porco Rosso)” is now available in Japan as a multi-language-subbed/dubbed Blu-ray. This action-fantasy about a porcine World War I pilot who battles air pirates while vying with a rival for ...
Akira Kurosawa once told me that if he were to make a film about the Emperor, “I would probably be killed. … Even if the film were highly positive, just the fact that I was using the Emperor as a character would be enough ...
I used to attract proselytizers, usually some variety of Christian, when I was thumbing around the United States in the early 1970s. Unlike most drivers who offered me rides, they didn’t want a captive ear for their personal confessions or rants. Instead they relentlessly ...
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa Language: Japanese (subtitled in English) YesAsia has started selling an English-subbed Hong Kong version of “Shokuzai (Penance),” Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s five-part chiller about a mother (Kyoko Koizumi) who yearns for karmic retribution against the classmates of her dead daughter, who saw her ...
After Japan’s defeat in World II, its art world fell into the same flux as the rest of the society, as the rules and values that had governed it for decades suddenly vanished. Styles and movements once censored and banned, from Soviet-style socialist realism ...
Whenever Hayao Miyazaki, now 72, makes a film, fans and critics weigh it against this anime master’s past triumphs — and often find it wanting. Japanese critics, especially, fondly recall the films that Miyazaki directed at the start of his long career as peaks. ...
Director: Roland Emmerich Language: English A new 4K mastered Blu-ray of “Godzilla,” the 1998 Hollywood reworking of the seminal 1954 Japanese monster movie, was released on July 16. Reviled by Godzilla fans upon its original release, this CGI extravaganza directed by Roland Emmerich did ...
Gakuryu Ishii has made something of a career of confounding fans and critics alike with his big shifts in artistic direction, his long silences and, in 2010, his name change from the unusual, if memorable, Sogo to the pretentious, if still hard-to-forget, Gakuryu (a ...
Director: Makoto Shinkai Language: English (international subtitles) Makoto Shinkai’s 46-minute animation “The Garden of Words (Koto no Ha no Niwa)” is now available on a multi-language subbed DVD from YesAsia. Bonuses include director and cast interviews, storyboards and a soundtrack CD. Fans of the ...
I first met Yutaka Tsuchiya in 1999 when I interviewed him on the release of “Atarashii Kamisama (The New God),” his documentary centering on a rightist punk band and its charismatic lead singer, Karin Amamiya. Despite his left-leaning politics, Tsuchiya was anything but the ...
Every once in awhile a movie sees around the corner to where the culture is heading. Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1971) was released when baby boomers were still baking granola and dreaming of communal peace and love, but its dystopian vision of ultra ...