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A sit-in by visa violators and their families entered its second day Tuesday in front of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau with protesters seeking government good will. The action at the bureau in Minato Ward is being organized by the Asian People’s Friendship Society, ...
Kazuhiro Shiraishi, 66, is a guest-house manager in the Izu-kogen Highlands, a famous resort area on the Izu Peninsula of Shizuoka Prefecture. Looking out onto the Pacific Ocean, and just 90 minutes by train from Tokyo, Izu has a warm climate all year round ...
“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, ...
Takashi Miike's blood-soaked vengeance tale, one of two Japanese films being shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, draws the biggest boos so far, with critics savaging it as overacted and cliched.
Have you ever given your best effort while striving to achieve something but felt like what you were doing was futile? That’s the feeling I’m getting about Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Olympics. With just over three months to go until the IOC ...
Tokyo International Players is an English-language theater troupe run by volunteers that evolved from the Tokyo Dramatic and Musical Association, formed at the Imperial Hotel on Feb. 10, 1896. At that time, one of its founders, Baroness Albert d’Anethan, wrote of her excitement about ...
Tarahumara is a mysterious area deep in Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains. Dancer Hiroshi Koike chose the enigmatic name for the dance-drama company he founded in 1982 because he aimed to create beautiful performances that transcend genre. Now aged 51 and the company’s director and ...
This “Man of La Mancha” has a lot to do with a man from South Korea: Cho Seung Woo, the film-star hero of such hits as “The Classic — Love Story” (2003) and “Marathon” (2005), and star of such musicals as “Rent” (2007), “Hedwig” ...
In China, she is regarded as one of the four great beauties of world history; in Japan she is one of three similar icons — along with Cleopatra and the Heian Period poet Komachi Ono-no. Her name was Yang Guifei (719-756), and she was ...
One of the world’s foremost directors of Shakespeare, one of Japan’s most outstanding translators of the Bard and a star-studded Japanese cast have teamed up to bring “The Merchant of Venice” to Tokyo this month. Englishman Gregory Doran, who staged the most productions — ...
Named in homage to the Romanian-born Absurdist playwright of the same name, the Eugene Ionesco Theater company will this month make its fourth visit to Japan to present Ionesco’s dark comedy “Jugyo (The Lesson).” The company, which was formed in the 1980s by young ...
On a sweltering summer day recently, members of the Condors dance troupe were pouring with sweat as they practiced for their upcoming national tour. Choreographer and lead dancer, Ryohei Kondo, was in the center of a circle of the dancers, who were voicing their ...
Matsuri (festivals) in Japan are not only about fireworks, as the monthlong “Summer Summit 2007″ drama event attests. Since the festival was first staged in 1989 by internationally renowned playwright/director Oriza Hirata, owner of the Komaba Agora Theater in Shibuya Ward, this biannual midsummer ...
Dance fans could be excused for, well, dancing in the streets thanks to the fancy footwork of Saitama Arts Theater in luring some of the world’s best contemporary troupes to its stage made famous as the home base of international theater titan Yukio Ninagawa. ...
While many young Japanese go to Canada to study English and some retirees enjoy holidays there, the number of Canadian theater companies staging performances in Japan are few and far between. Quebec-based theater director, playwright and actor Robert Lepage — known for his work ...
What goes around comes around, they say, and in the early 1980s, Japan’s contemporary drama scene was transformed by a slew of small companies that were the artistic heirs of the previous generation’s radical student politics. That brave new world of the so-called shogekijo ...
Two years ago, playwright Shoji Kokami, founder of The Third Stage company in Tokyo, started working with the cutting-edge Bush Theatre in West London on his 1993 play “Trance.” One of the prime movers in the 1980s small-scale youth theater movement in Japan, the ...