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 ...
“On Mosquitoes Human and Other Animals” is the work of artist Beatriz Inglessis in collaboration with three other people: philosopher Suzanne McCullagh, education specialist Renee Jackson and gallery curator Shai Ohayon. The latest show at The Container gallery in Nakameguro, it’s the result of ...
While a golden age for secular arts, Japan's Edo Period (1603-1867) is broadly dismissed by art historians as a period of stagnation for Buddhist sculpture.
With a population of around 35 million, Greater Tokyo is the ultimate “modernist” conurbation; a vast megacity, where something as old-fashioned as realist art might seem out-of-date and out-of-place. Maybe so, but on the metropolis’ western and eastern extremities stand two museums that, each ...
Jaws dropped as American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, arriving in Japan in the 1980s, named Yasujiro Ozu as one of the directors he was most inspired by. Ozu, active from the 1920s up to the 1960s, was then considered old fashioned for his slow pace ...
The last couple of shows at the Shiodome Museum have been colorful and varied affairs, but the latest exhibition, showcasing Yukio Futagawa’s photos of traditional Japanese houses taken in 1955, strikes a very different note. There is an absence of color and accompanying objects, ...
Most people know the famous riddle, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Many are also aware that it is connected with Zen Buddhism, and some will even know that it is a famous koan by the 18th-century monk Hakuin. A koan, of ...
Amid the hurry of daily life it is easy to forget what lies below our feet. To most of us, it may appear to be just cement or dirt, but to artist Kenji Yamada there are profound mysteries contained on the ground, in things ...
In Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne,” the riotous clash of cymbals and blowing of trumpets in the hands of the revelers can almost be heard. In similar ways, artists from at least the Renaissance onward, have attempted to suggest the presence of music in their ...
Imagine you went to a movie theatre that insisted on doing anything other than showing you an actual movie, or to a restaurant where the waiter did all he could to stop you having an actual meal. This is a situation I sometimes find ...
Art can sometimes be surprisingly serious and po-faced, almost as if it were seen as a kind of substitute religion. Luckily, none of this pomposity attaches itself to the work of Sasae Ono, one of Japan’s most talented artists in the 20th-century, and the ...
The fusion of East and West is a major theme in 20th-century art, even though, in important ways, the two don’t mix. What seems at one point to be their ostensible unification, appears in another as discordant. Such inconsonance lurks in the background at ...
In Yanaka, a 10-minute walk from Nippori Station in Tokyo, a new art center is being constructed in the shell of a 50-year-old house that had been the atelier and residence of students from Tokyo Art University since 2004. Like many buildings of its ...
