When it was announced last year that entertainment Renaissance man Kankuro Kudo would write the script for NHK’s spring-summer 2013 “TV novel,” a few people probably wondered how the iconoclastic writer-director-actor would respond to the broadcaster’s narrative strictures. In a recent interview with Aera, ...

The morning after TV Asahi’s evening news show “Hodo Station” ran an interview with figure skater Miki Ando on July 1, the media was buzzing over the revelation that Ando had given birth in April. The baby was not the ostensible reason for the ...

The Wall Street Journal posted an interesting article on its Japan Real Time blog regarding the Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP’s) beef with broadcaster TBS, whom it accused of bias against the ruling party on its “News 11″ program. Reporter Toko Sekiguchi didn’t go into ...

Two weeks ago one of the big stories in the tabloid press was on Jurip Al-Asa, the father of popular TV personality Rola. He was in the news because the Tokyo Metropolitan Police had issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of swindling. ...

The model house sat on an empty patch of brown land along a commercial stretch of road in southern Ibaraki Prefecture. Few people would have identified it as a model house. It had a forlorn, out-of-place look to it. Technically, it was a mobile ...

More than two years on from the disaster of March 11, 2011, debate continues in the mainstream and social media about the uses of fear to advance agendas. Much of the debate is centered on the environmental crisis surrounding the crippled Fukushima nuclear reactor. ...

Two weeks ago, the nightly series “Heart Net TV,” which is broadcast on NHK’s educational channel, repeated a program about a 35-year-old Japanese man who married a 70-year-old Dutch man in the Netherlands. The series dedicates several programs a month to sexual minorities, and ...

The government has just established a new public award named after alpinist-skier Yuichiro Miura for “adventurers who challenge themselves to the limit of human potential.” Originally the recipients of the prize, whom Miura will select himself, were going to be seniors, but at its ...

During a recent visit to the United States, I was impressed by several advertising campaigns. The American Beverage Association (ABA) is running a series of spots that alternatingly complain of what it deems the over-regulation of soft drinks and promote the efforts of member ...

The flyers were provocative: New houses priced at more than ¥35 million, but the builder promised that the mortgage would amount to ¥0 a month. A free house is obviously too good to be true, but we decided to check out the merchandise to ...