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.
Without doubt, Takahiro Fujita is the most prominent newcomer in the world of Japanese contemporary theater. To a considerable extent that’s because the 27-year-old playwright/director has an unusual trademark style — to create works that often have the same lyrical phrases and series of ...
As kabuki fans will already know, for more than 30 years, the Kokaido (public hall) in Asakusa has celebrated the Tokyo district’s history as a thriving entertainment area by reviving the Edo Period (1603-1867) tradition of New Year’s special kabuki performances. These shows have ...
The place to start when reviewing this year’s highlights in contemporary Japanese theater, has to be The Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11. That day led to a nation in mourning, an ongoing nuclear crisis and an awakening among dramatists, who saw the ...
Japan’s performing arts world is massively centered on Tokyo, yet one of its leading lights is based in Aomori City in the country’s deeply unchic far north — and he’s a school teacher. Each morning during term time, Seigo Hatasawa, a 47-year-old playwright, director ...
Tough-looking with their cockscomb mohawks — the red one topping Ketch!; the yellow one, HIRO-PON — the “silent-comedy” duo Gamarjobat (“Hello” in Georgian) are now well into a 31-stop tour that’s filling theaters around the country with whoops and rollicking laughter — as well ...
“This wonderful project started when my friend, the Lebanese writer Wajdi Mouawad, gave me a book and said I should make a movie out it,” Francois Girard explains. “But after I read it I got back to him and said, ‘Sorry, I disagree with ...
Chiaki Soma, the program director at Festival/Tokyo (F/T), needed to figure out how to proceed with the country’s biggest theater festival following the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11. She closed her office for 10 days and asked the staff to carefully consider ...
Next year will mark the New York premiere performances of a new collaborative project whose organizers hope will spur a revolution in the film and theater industries of Japan. Hikobae, meaning, in Japanese, the new shoots that sprout from a felled tree, is the ...
Tokyo-born Sachiko Hara, 46, was the apple of her ordinary, working-parents’ eye. She was encouraged to get a degree in German studies from the prestigious Sophia University, and after that it seemed some sort of high-flying career was hers for the taking. But during ...
The upcoming staging of NHK Enterprises’ fifth “Gei no Shinzui” (“The Essence of Art”) series at the National Theatre in Tokyo promises a rare and rather sublime Kyoto treat for the capital’s lovers of traditional Japanese performing arts. Titled “Kyo no Miyabi” (“The Elegance ...
Noh, the 600-year-old performing art featuring drummers, chorus singers and masked actors, has survived in the modern world to this day thanks to its loyal, though aging, fan base. But as with many other traditional art forms, it is in dire need of new ...
When the mayor of a village is told by a frog king, who is fascinated by the elegance of swans gliding in the lake, that his villagers should wear toe shoes (ballet pointe shoes) all the time, he instructs everyone between the age of ...
