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.
Masato Harada, who once directed Hollywood-style entertainments such as 1989′s sci-fi actioner “Ganheddo (Gunhed)” and the America-set 1993 road movie “Painted Desert,” has since made a specialty of dramas about Japanese men at work. Based on true events and packed with incident, they made ...
By the time I entered college, my family had moved house seven times. The process of adjusting to a new place grew harder as I became a teenager, though by the time of our last move I was more accepting — or indifferent, take ...
“Tetsuo (Tetsuo: The Iron Man),” the 1989 film that made Shinya Tsukamoto internationally famous, was the cinematic equivalent of a jackhammer to the brain: harsh, loud, violent and unrelenting. But this cyberpunk fantasy about a salaryman transforming into a metal monster was also strangely ...
Japan’s silent-film era began with an exhibition of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope film-viewing device in Kobe in November 1896, only about one year after the first-ever public film screening in Paris. Despite the early importation of equipment and films from abroad, the Japanese film industry ...
The fourth edition of the Okinawa International Movie Festival, held from March 24 to 31, was a strange beast, combining screenings of 102 films from Japan, Asia and elsewhere with manzai comics and other acts from the powerful Yoshimoto Kogyo agency, which underwrote the ...
Tao Nashimoto’s “Ano Sora no Ao (Halcyon Skies),” which premiered at this year’s Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival, is the type of lyrical, personal, naturalistically acted and elliptically narrated Japanese indie film I used to see by the dozen in the 1990s but is ...
Yoshimitsu Morita, who died last December at 61, would seem to be a classic example of a brilliant young independent filmmaker who ends up as a mainstream journeyman, a career path all too common in Japanese films. After winning international praise for “Kazoku Gemu ...
Of Japanese movies about star-crossed young lovers there will never be an end. The mostly female audience never tires of them, decade after decade. The genre has hardly gone extinct in the West either, though fans now tend to like their romantic fantasies spiced ...
BIG HAPPINESS: The Life and Death of a Modern Hawaiian Warrior, by Mark Panek. University of Hawaii Press, 2011, 320 pp., $18.99 (paperback) Hawaii was once a prime recruiting ground for professional sumo. The pioneer was Jesse Kuhaulua from Oahu’s Happy Valley, who entered ...
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Hollywood rolled out multiplex-ready films focusing on the events of that tragic day. In the year since the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear catastrophe in the Tohoku region, dozens of Japanese and foreign filmmakers have ...
