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 ...
Wes Anderson is one of those directors who, love him or hate him, has been remarkably consistent. Each film, from “Rushmore” right on down, is an artfully constructed and totally hermetic world unto itself, with flawed or absent father-figures, a closet’s worth of funky-yet-chic ...
Mr. Antonini, who lived in the house next to ours in Brooklyn, had a rejoinder for all life’s ailments. “You think you got problems?” he’d say with a querulous edge to his voice. “Wait till you get to my age, and I’ll show you ...
Those directors who return to the same theme over and over commonly use the same actor to embody it. Akira Kurosawa cast Toshiro Mifune as the intense hero in film after film about masculine, if not always traditionally macho, heroism. Juzo Itami starred wife ...
There are certain novels they say just can’t be filmed, but guess what? Most of them have been. “Dune”? “Naked Lunch”? “The Virgin Suicides”? “The 120 Days of Sodom”? “Ulysses”? All done — “Ulysses” twice, even. Call it the inability of a filmmaker to ...
Director Ang Lee’s adaptation of author Yann Martel’s Man Booker Prize-winning “Life of Pi” feels almost like two films sandwiched into one. In the core, you have the succulent special-effects-driven story of a young Indian survivor of a shipwreck who’s adrift in a lifeboat ...
Film director Nagisa Oshima passed away Tuesday. He was 80. While at London’s Heathrow Airport in February 1996, he suffered a stroke. Rehabilitation in the succeeding years brought him sufficiently back to health to make what would become his last film, “Gohatto,” in 1999. ...
Music documentaries nearly all feature nonmusical moments, such as Bob Dylan sardonically jousting with journalists in "Dont Look Back." "Furasshubakku Memorizu 3D (Flashback Memories 3D)," a documentary of didgeridoo player Goma offers no such moments.
Since his 1999 debut “Anyon Kimuchi (Annyong Kimchi),” a documentary about his zainichi (ethnic Korean) family, Tetsuaki Matsue has been interested in those on the margins of Japanese society — though he is hardly the director-as-crusader. Instead, as he showed in “Raibu Tepu (Live ...
If you go to see “Armadillo”, you will be in a cinema watching a war movie. A documentary, yes, but one that’s safely on the screen as you sit back and watch Danish soldiers deployed in Afghanistan. You will watch those same soldiers try ...
Roberto Rossellini once said that a good movie has the power to change the world, and here’s a film made by his compatriots (octogenarian Italian brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani) that may prove him right. It certainly alters the way one looks at the ...
Film director Nagisa Oshima, who died in Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture, of pneumonia on Tuesday at age 80, was a leader of Japan’s postwar New Wave movement. In the West, however, he became best known for a 1976 film “Ai no Corrida” (“In the Realm ...
This review as originally published on Sunday, Jan. 28, 1968. Director Nagisa Oshima occupies somewhat the same place in the Japanese cinema that Jean-Luc Godard does in the French. A complete intellectual, he is much more interested in ideas than stories, and has more ...
