Transport authorities launched a full-fledged investigation Sunday into the derailment of a bullet train on the Akita Shinkansen Line in Daisen, Akita Prefecture, on Saturday afternoon.
It's a dangerous, unpredictable world. Twice in January Chinese warships in the East China Sea challenged Japan's Maritime Self Defense Forces patrols in a manner deemed threatening. And on Feb. 12 came North Korea's nuclear test.
Here's an open secret: Japanese men have a bad international reputation on the romance front.
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, ...
Kenta Maeda shook off worries about his form with five shutout innings as Japan beat China 5-2 in first-round Pool A of the World Baseball Classic on Sunday at Fukuoka Dome. Japan improved to 2-0 following a tough win over Brazil in Saturday evening’s ...
Is there a body part that is not, for someone, an erogenous zone? Feet have their fans. So do eyes, noses and, as Hiroshi Horiuchi’s “Mimi wo Kaku Onna (The Ear Cleaner)” makes clear, ears. But in this third theatrical film by Horiuchi, following ...
What is your worst nightmare? In this Internet age, public shaming by misdirected tweet or surreptitious smartphone snap has come to rank high. Of course, the sex video that just happens to go viral has propelled more than one “victim” to stardom (or at ...
Chronic respiratory disease is something I’ve lived with as a parent. My son’s severe asthma had him in and out of hospitals and doctor’s offices from infancy on, including several life-threatening emergencies. Thankfully, as he grew to adulthood, the bad episodes became fewer, though ...
Sion Sono is known for making extreme films that get invited to major festivals. One is “Himizu,” a drama set near the Tohoku disaster zone post-March 11, 2011, and whose abused teenage hero seethes with violent rage — and unleashes it on a classmate ...
Not long ago Sion Sono was known abroad mainly as a maker of cult shockers, starting with his 2001 international hit “Jisatsu Sakuru (Suicide Club).” His films still supply rude jolts to the system, though in his latest work he has also shown a ...
The Tokyo International Film Festival, which runs Oct. 20-28 at Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills and other venues around the capital and the Tohoku region, is a great opportunity to see new Japanese films — with a couple caveats. First, not all of them are ...
Gender bending in movies is usually a cue for comedy, especially when taken to more fantastic extremes, as when Debbie Reynolds plays a womanizer reincarnated as a woman in Vincente Minnelli’s “Goodbye Charlie” (1964) or Satomi Kobayashi and Toshinori Omi play teens who switch ...
Yakuza movies were once as easy to understand as white-hat-versus-black-hat Hollywood Westerns. A gang that upholds the traditional jingi code of yakuza “chivalry” is being out-fought, out-knifed and outgunned by ruthless, greedy rival hoods. Then a stoic lone outlaw, typically played by Ken Takakura, ...
An anime with a sad-eyed waif as the hero must surely be something for the kiddies, no? Well no, if the waif carries a blood-stained axe and greedily devours human flesh like a starved wolf. Keiichi Sato’s feature animation “Ashura (Asura),” whose eponymous hero ...
After winning the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2009 for his funeral-business drama “Okuribito (Departures),” Yojiro Takita faced the usual dilemma of the successful: what to do for a followup? This onetime maker of risqué comedies about train gropers had since become a ...
