In his Olympic year, Oscar Pistorius steadily became an avid firearms collector, joining a gun-collecting club and purchasing a collection of firearms that included a .500 Magnum pistol and a civilian version of a military assault rifle.
When it comes to gender equality, Japan has never failed to disappoint.
Here's an open secret: Japanese men have a bad international reputation on the romance front.
SELLING WOMEN: Prostitution, Markets and the Household in Early Modern Japan, by Amy Stanley. University of California Press, 2012, 282 pp., $49.95 (hardcover) In the vast cultural landscape, Japan fascinates the mainstream with manga and anime, the martial arts, Zen and kimono. Of course, ...
Manchester United's Shinji Kagawa is back with a bang, becoming the first Asian player to score a hat trick in the English Premier League.
Tomohiro Osaki is a staff contributor in the Arts, Entertainment and Features Division. A graduate of Sophia University in Tokyo, he likes to explore under-reported realities of Japanese youth, with a tendency toward the taboo.
For Tomohiro Osaki's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Being a talented conversationalist is a vital part of the skill set of any accomplished hostess. The same goes for top-class geisha. Veteran geisha Ikuko, for example, recalls scouring newspapers avidly for potential conversation topics, dining with her apprentices every morning, and even frequenting ...
“Madonna del Granduca” is a beloved masterpiece by Italian painter Raffaello Sanzio (1483-1520), known by most as simply Raphael. Described by critics as one of the great Madonna and child paintings, it was a source of inspiration for many generations of painters. As one ...
Architect Shigeru Ban is renowned for involving himself in unusual projects, and he has become particularly well-known for his experiments with paper as a cheap and sustainable building material. In response to the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, Ban designed paper temporary shelters for victims. ...
Juvenile delinquency. Intersexuality. Terminal-illness treatment. These are the kinds of social issues theater troupe Fukinkobo has fearlessly tackled over the years, giving it a reputation for having the courage of its convictions to spotlight the predicament of people with marginalized social status. This time ...
Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) is well-known for the opulence and eroticism of his works, which often focused on the female nude, and for his preoccupation with themes of death. This exhibition, which commemorates the 150th anniversary of Klimt’s birth, focuses on the ...
The 1964 Summer Olympics will forever be remembered as one of the most important events in Japan’s postwar history. To Japan, hosting the Olympics was the nation’s opportunity to prove to the world that it had strength and power to recover and progress from ...
With the growing popularity of high-tech art, such as digital media and installations, engraving woodblock prints might seem primitive and old-fashioned. Many Japanese, in fact, associate woodblock printing with older-generation artisans, who they imagine slave fastidiously over works in the silence of a gloomy ...
When Naojiro Kobayashi outlived a diagnosis that a lung disease he was suffering from would kill him by the age of 25, his favorite phrase became: “I’m so embarrassed I have lived this long.” But he continued to defy the disease, finally living to ...
While it seems politics is all that comes to mind when talking about China these days, the current New Year’s holiday shows what a remarkable breadth of culture the country has. It just so happens that Yokohama is home to one of the biggest ...
Printmaker Yozo Hamaguchi (1909-2000) is best known for his ground-breaking work in colored mezzotints. His predominant use of soft but dark coloring, which gave the mezzotints a peaceful and serene quality, differentiated his work from other print artists, and led to the global recognition ...
