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 ...
Donald Richie was a scrupulous writer who paid finite attention to language and content. The following are 10 outstanding choices — titles that should be on any discerning readers’ bookshelf. “Tokyo: A View of the City” (1999) Here Richie manages to give the impression ...
Nowadays, the name of the Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) is known throughout the world. But it wasn’t always like this — and it might never have been, without the efforts of Donald Richie. After Ozu’s masterpiece “Tokyo Story” was released in 1953, ...
It was with a heavy heart that I heard from Donald Richie's longtime friend and editor Leza Lowitz that he had passed away on the morning of Tuesday, this week. He was 88.
Beginning with 2001′s “Ichiban Utsukushi Natsu (Firefly Dreams),” a Yasujiro Ozu-esque drama about a friendship that develops between a rebellious teenage girl and an elderly former actress in the countryside, John Williams has been directing films in Japan with Japanese talent that do not ...
Japan’s silent-film era began with an exhibition of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope film-viewing device in Kobe in November 1896, only about one year after the first-ever public film screening in Paris. Despite the early importation of equipment and films from abroad, the Japanese film industry ...
NORIKO SMILING, by Adam Mars-Jones. Notting Hill Editions, 2011, 239 pp., ￡12.00 (hardcover). “I can hardly be accused of being an expert on Japanese film,” Adam Mars-Jones assures us early in “Noriko Smiling,” his monograph on Yasujiro Ozu’s “Late Spring.” Such protestations at the ...
Japanese directors with any kind of ambition usually end up making a family drama, which is to Japanese cinema what the Western used to be to Hollywood: the core national genre. Of course, plenty of bad-to-mediocre directors here have made family dramas, just as ...
A HUNDRED YEARS OF JAPANESE FILM, by Donald Richie. Kodansha International, 2005, 320 pp., $22 (paper). Among Japanophiles, Donald Richie doesn’t need an introduction, having written over 40 books on Japan, including the definitive works on directors Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, and the ...
JAPANESE HORROR CINEMA, edited by Jay McRoy, preface by Christopher Sharrett. Edinburgh University Press, 2005, Traditions in World Cinema Series, 220 pp., £16.99. (paper). Latest among the packaged movie trends is the Japanese horror film. Every month more samples appear, all of them scrutinized ...
THE CINEMA OF GOSHO HEINOSUKE, by Arthur Nolletti, Jr. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005, 243 pp., with photographs, $27.95 (paper). Though Heinosuke Gosho (1902-1981) is remembered in Japan where his films are still occasionally shown, he is all but unknown abroad. This neglect is ...
GENDER AND POWER IN THE JAPANESE VISUAL FIELD, edited by Joshua S. Mostow, Norman Bryson and Maribeth Graybill. Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press, 2003, 292 pp., 7 color plates, 106 b/w illustrations, $36.00 (cloth). The original impetus for this interesting volume came during the 1994 ...
THE MIDNIGHT EYE GUIDE TO NEW JAPANESE FILM, by Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp, foreword by Hideo Nakata. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press. 366 pp., 151 b/w photos, $22.95 (paper). The authors of this very interesting new compendium on recent Japanese cinema would agree, I ...
