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M/CLOUDY
Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto aims to retract his remark that U.S. servicemen in Okinawa should use the local adult entertainment industry to avoid committing sex crimes.
Kan Yasuda's art somehow draws in the landscape, and entices in people, so that it is natural to explore the view through his structures and keyholes, to sit awhile atop a sculpture or to pose within their frames.
If you don’t get into the ring once or twice, then you’re a coward, Geoffrey Ima says as he describes people’s attitudes toward boxing in his hometown in Uganda. Ima has been in the ring hundreds of times and came to love boxing so ...
It may seem perverse to express nostalgia for a category of mental illness, but many sufferers, as well as some psychiatrists, regret the passing of “manic depression.”
Getting slapped by a a coach has always been, as far as I could see, simply another aspect of sports training in Japan.
The “microwave phenomenon” is with us again. I use this term to describe a product that arrives on the market before its time, then disappears for a while before returning with a vengeance to strike at people’s hearts and wallets. In the mid-1950s, microwave ...
Nothing gets the circulation going like sex. I am, of course, talking about the circulation of magazines and newspapers; and if you had different associations, perhaps you are just the kind of person who should read this article. When it comes to sex, the ...
Fingerpointing, dear reader, has been elevated to an art. Halliburton is pointing the finger at BP. Transocean is also pointing the finger at BP. And BP, not to be outdone, is pointing fingers at both Halliburton and Transocean. In the meantime, enough oil is ...
Every generation has its theme song. I was contemplating this quaint truism when trying to pinpoint a tune that would neatly sum up the mores of the men and women who grew to adulthood in Japan between 1960 and 1985, the era of rapid ...
Europe received a cultural shock of major proportions during the last quarter of the 19th century. The exquisite shikisai kankaku (sense of color), the startling spatial and compositional elements and the sublime craftsmanship of the Japanese arts took the continent by storm. Many well-known ...
The formative culture of a country is its subculture. Mainstream culture is about the present; subculture creates the future. In Japan, there have been three seminal subcultures since the end of World War II in 1945. The first was the politically radical one of ...
When I was living in Kyoto in the late 1960s, I would often see homeless people along the banks of the Kamo River. They generally lived under the bridges in structures made of cardboard and blue sheeting. Having seen many homeless people in my ...
O n Friday, April 9, Hisashi Inoue died at the age of 75, and with his passing Japan lost its most brilliant playwright. Hisashi — I shall use his given name, as we both always used our given names together — was my closest ...
“Calender journalism” is what it’s called. It’s when the anniversary of an event, ideally in some round number of years, provides the point of departure for an article commemorating the event and/or considering its ongoing relevance. So it is that the 15th anniversary of ...
A drama currently being played out on the stage of national politics in Japan may well mark a turning point in the country’s postwar history. On March 9, a panel of experts appointed by Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada presented its findings on secret agreements ...
The misery of war remains for many long years as scar tissue in the minds of children deeply traumatized by it. And yet, there are not many works of fiction or nonfiction that have conveyed the confusion and pain felt by such children. In ...
“Elephant,” by Minoru Betsuyaku, is a postwar classic of Japanese drama. One of the very few Japanese plays written about the aftermath of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, it has been performed many times in this country since ...