In July 1959, Japan’s leading film magazine, Kinema Junpo, published a list of what it hailed as “The best 10 Japanese films of all time.” This list included works by such acknowledged masters as Mikio Naruse, as well as the young but by then ...

Britain may be broken, but London is hot. A recent trip to the city exhilarated me. Everywhere I went it was the crowds of young, ethnically mixed and very hip kids that stood out. They have redefined what it means to be British. Bin ...

Iwas thrilled when, around Easter this year, I received an email from a leading American publishing house. “We’ve been reading your column in The Japan Times and would be very open to your submitting a story for an anthology of religious pieces we are ...

Every year when I was a child, my parents would take my brother and me from our Los Angeles home to Las Vegas on vacation. Back then in the 1950s, Vegas was still a family-oriented holiday destination. Dad would drop a few bucks at ...

Iam just back from a five-day journey around Iwate Prefecture in Tohoku with an NHK TV crew. We were making a four-part program about the Iwate-born author and poet Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933), and our journey took us from Oshu City to his hometown of ...

Second of two parts Postwar Japan was rife with polemics. Thick magazines such as Chuo Koron, Sekai and many others that carried in-depth analysis and cutting comment were read and discussed by people of all classes and shades of opinion, left, right and center. ...

Upwards of 2,000 demonstrators clash with riot police. Sections of trains are set alight, the fire spreads into the station and trains don’t start running until late in the morning. In the middle of the night, some 450 people are arrested. Another time, at ...

Food is a staple fare of the media, whether in the form of recipes, restaurant reviews or photographs of meals to die for. Food is health; food is economics; food is culture; but food is also politics. “Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te ...

Second of two parts When “The Green Hornet,” the old radio and comic book series about the masked white vigilante, was turned into a television series in 1966-’67, Japanese-American actor Mako played the Chinese Low Sing, while Chinese-American and Hong Kong actor Bruce Lee ...

First of two parts A little boy cannot be found at his village school. He is hiding under its floorboards. His name is Chibi, which means “little tyke.” He cannot make friends. The other children will not play with him. Chibi stares at the ...

In the lead-up this week to the 10th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, it is important to keep in mind this: Dates take on a mythical significance that may mask reality. Sept. ...

Aug. 28 is the fourth anniversary of the passing of a woman who was an icon in both Japan and the United States. Yet her death in 2007 was barely noted in this, her home country, despite her meteoric rise to stardom in America ...