Transport authorities launched a full-fledged investigation Sunday into the derailment of a bullet train on the Akita Shinkansen Line in Daisen, Akita Prefecture, on Saturday afternoon.
It's a dangerous, unpredictable world. Twice in January Chinese warships in the East China Sea challenged Japan's Maritime Self Defense Forces patrols in a manner deemed threatening. And on Feb. 12 came North Korea's nuclear test.
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, ...
Kenta Maeda shook off worries about his form with five shutout innings as Japan beat China 5-2 in first-round Pool A of the World Baseball Classic on Sunday at Fukuoka Dome. Japan improved to 2-0 following a tough win over Brazil in Saturday evening’s ...
Classical Chinese painters were masters of rocky mountains, but Liu Dan, one of a group of contemporary artists putting a new twist on 1,000-year-old tradition, sticks with just the rock. Liu’s minutely detailed “Scholar’s Rock” — a large-scale, almost photographic exploration of a single ...
“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 ...
Artists have added text to artworks for centuries, usually as a way to enhance or explain a concept. Tadanori Yokoo, however, combines painting and words in ways that often have no purpose at all. Sometimes, lettering is chosen for purely aesthetic purposes — to ...
Once you see the paintings of Paul Delvaux you are unlikely to forget them. The dreamlike mood and quaint atmosphere is unique and hypnotic. But where does the mysterious power of his art come from? The exhibition “Paul Delvaux: Dream Odyssey” at the Museum ...
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 ...
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 ...
A dozen paintings hang from the white walls of a gallery at the Museum of Modern Art in Hayama, Kanagawa Prefecture. Mostly prewar works by artists involved in the Proletarian movement, who focused on depictions of factory and farm laborers, the paintings are like ...
Painter Daisuke Fukunaga (b.1981) states: “If the world is the stage of a theater, I want to paint the bustle of the things waiting behind the blackout curtain rather than the heroine.” His motifs are of things forgotten and neglected, but unlike his earlier ...
For five years starting in 2007, Shinpei Kusanagi (b.1973) made monthly serialized paintings to accompany installments of Teru Miyamoto’s novel “Mizu no Katachi” (“The Shape of Water”) in the magazine éclat. Text and image had little to do with one another, though the small, ...
Japan’s ancient capital of Kyoto has long been a popular theme for artists. This exhibition explores how Japanese painters from different eras have visualized and interpreted the city’s unique allure. Created at different points in history, the images also portray social and environmental changes ...
Located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute is known in the United States for its wide range of European masterpieces dating from the Renaissance to the late 19th century. Besides its famous collection of French Impressionist paintings, it houses all ...
