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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 ...
"Outsider art" is relatively new in Japan and, as a genre, works made by self-taught Japanese artists are still not very well known on the category-delineating, label-loving international art scene.
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.
When speaking of Japanese art, people use words such as wabi and sabi, words that speak of a delicate sensibility and an ephemeral existence. Viewing the retrospective show of painter Toko Shinoda, the first word that comes to mind is "power."
Director Satoshi Miki’s new comedy “Ore Ore (It’s Me, it’s Me)” is more on the cultish than the commercial end of the scale, with its head-scratcher of a story about a first-time scammer who starts encountering various versions of himself in a bizarre new ...
It’s fitting that I should be meeting Terre Thaemlitz on May 1, International Workers’ Day — she wryly refers to herself as a “feminist Marxist” before we begin our interview in proper. Thaemlitz, who produces music under her real name, the moniker DJ Sprinkles ...
At age 41, Takashi Fujii has quite the resume. In 2000 and 2001, he appeared on national broadcaster NHK’s annual top-rated New Year’s variety show, “Kohaku Utagassen” (“Red and White Song Battle”); he toured abroad as a pop singer in 2004, including shows in ...
Sitting in an interview room at the Bunkamura cultural complex in Tokyo's Shibuya district, María Pagés leans forward, smiles and tells me: "Flamenco is my language."
This Monday, members of the seminal metal band X Japan were in Odaiba rubbing shoulders with the likes of Brad Pitt, Lady Gaga and AKB48′s Yuko Oshima. The catch? They were all made out of wax. The life-size representations were just five of the ...
The story goes that precisely 1,385 years ago, two brothers, Hinokuma Hamanari and Hinokuma Takenari, were fishing in Sumida River when they discovered in their nets an unlikely object: a statue of the Bodhisattva Kannon. Buddhism itself was still little known in Japan back ...
It is a tricky deal being an authorized biographer. Charles Moore’s big advantage over those who have previously tackled Margaret Thatcher is that he has been provided with material denied to them. Of the arrangement that he was offered by his subject, he writes: ...
These days a college education doesn’t get you as far as it used to, though it comes in handy for solving crimes, apparently. The hero of the two-hour suspense drama “Katei Kyoshi ga Toku” (“Private Tutor Solves the Case”; TBS, Mon., 9 p.m.) is ...