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Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, resolved to end nearly two decades of deflation and revive the economy, explains his economic and fiscal policies to his fellow G-8 chiefs, turning "Abenomics" into an international commitment in the process.
Keeping track of your assets Money Forward is a personal financial asset management service (in Japanese) that works similar to the U.S.-based service Mint.com. With more than 160 partners including banks, credit-card companies and mobile carriers, the service automatically pulls all your financial information ...
Edward Snowden, the fugitive former CIA employee and NSA contractor who leaked secrets about America’s spying operations, often hung out online with foreigners in Japan who shared his interests in anime, video games, martial arts, the stock market and the expat lifestyle. Snowden, who ...
The Toronto Comics Arts Festival, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, has of late made its name bringing over cutting-edge Japanese artists for signings, live drawing sessions and speaking events. The atmosphere at this year’s event, held in May, in many ways like ...
Tuukka Rask watched most of the action at the other end of the ice. And when the Blackhawks did make a late charge, he was ready. The Bruins goalie stopped 28 shots for his third career playoff shutout, helping Boston beat Chicago 2-0 on ...
In 2001, a peculiar contemporary-art space called Tokyo Wonder Site opened in a disused building in Bunkyo Ward in Northeast Tokyo. Supported by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, the project attracted a measure of initial interest, but never developed into anything like a hot spot ...
I participated last Sunday in a thing called the “Dean Martin Memorial Stop Misery Outreach Action.” This is a public happening that goes back some 10 years in Japan, and involves distributing one hundred martinis — shaken on the spot, with uncommonly good gin ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.” If so, then urban man is severely ocularly undernourished. Once broad and punctuated by the occasional construction, the sky has in our lifetime been all but overtaken by buildings — and ...
Federico Herrero made a splash with his wall paintings of weirdly morphed animals at the 2001 Venice Biennale and, at age 22, became the youngest-ever winner of the prestigious art fair’s Golden Lion Award. In the wake of that success, the Costa Rican-born painter ...
This week brings some good news and some bad news to Tokyo’s contemporary art scene. The good news is that a group of galleries that have been sharing a building in Shinkawa since January 2003 have relocated en masse, and now all boast significantly ...
The usual reasons for the formation of artists’ groups are similarities in media, style or philosophy. But the only link for the six members of the “Showa 40″ group, who rank among Japan’s best contemporary artists, is the year of their births, 1965. There ...
Following on its impressive inauguration in 2001, the second Yokohama International Triennale of Contemporary Art is finally here, albeit a year late, and I have to say it has turned out far better than I had anticipated. There are 86 artists from 30 countries ...
I have been an admirer of Miwa Yanagi since encountering her series “My Grandmothers” at the 2001 Yokohama Triennale. In that body of work the artist displayed extraordinary skill in using makeup and staging to transform a number of young women into images of ...
The elegant and enigmatic new exhibition at the Mori Art Museum, “The End of Time,” is a retrospective on four decades of work by Hiroshi Sugimoto. One of Japan’s most internationally acclaimed artists, Sugimoto uses photography to condense events in celebrated time-exposure series such ...
I was chatting with old friends in Toronto last week, and our conversation came round to the subject of Japanese manga. I made clear my reservations regarding the popularity of pulp manga in Japan, and bemoaned the fact that many manga artists have even ...
I was recently tempted to term the handsome old Bridgestone Museum as “the last of a dying breed.” But that hardly seems appropriate any more, considering the Nihonbashi art space’s ongoing evolution. Instead, the Bridgestone might be better described as “a survivor” — and ...
Tokyo art collectors were out in force as the first-annual Tokyo Art Fair (TAF) debuted this past weekend (Aug. 6-8) at the Tokyo International Forum in Yurakucho. The fair saw participation from 81 galleries and art-related companies. The demise of Nippon Contemporary Art Fair ...