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 movements repeated over and over again. ...
A play about William Adams, thought to be the first Englishman to set foot in Japan, is being staged in ...
An 18-year-old high school student won third place at the prestigious Prix de Lausanne ballet competition in Switzerland over the ...
If art's purpose is to ask the relevant questions, then British-Bangladeshi dancer Akram Khan successfully interrogates humanity — and himself — with his latest production, "Desh."
It’s a fair bet that many people at the Globe Theatre in London last May expected the Kyoto-based Chiten (Point) Company to present a stereotypically Japanese, samurai-style “Coriolanus,” complete with taiko drums and period armor. Instead, however, Japan’s contribution to the theater’s Globe to ...
Japan’s calamities of March 2011 — the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, and the start of an ongoing nuclear disaster — changed not only the social awareness of the general public who make up theater audiences, but also how dramatists approached their work. ...
Two years ago, 32-year-old director/translator Eriko Ogawa returned to Japan after 10 years in New York and presented a riveting production of “The Late Henry Moss,” Sam Shepard’s 2000 Pulitzer prize-winning tale of loves and hatreds in a frontier family way out West. Though ...
In a small studio just a seagull’s squawk from Tokyo Bay in the Higashi Gotanda district of Shinagawa Ward, a unique play titled “Understandable?” briefly delighted packed houses of baffled Japanese and others recently with its absurd-but-not, “abandoned- in-translation” dialogue devoid of subtitles. Showcasing ...
Almost the whole of Kentaro’s life has been devoted to dance — in particular to hip-hop dance — ever since he first saw it on television as an elementary school boy. Even today, as a well-known professional dancer who prefers not to reveal his ...
Like many people in the 1980s, Adrian Grant was a huge Michael Jackson fan. He was so fond of the “King of Pop” that he started a Jackson fan magazine titled “Off The Wall” in 1988. Grant says he wrote and designed the entire ...
The upcoming “Sakurama Kinki no Kai” is the 19th noh event in a series of performances by Sakurama Kinki of the Komparu School. Of the five noh schools still active today, the Komparu School is the most traditional, though it has, interestingly, taken the ...
In Japan’s performing arts scene, it’s widely believed that 32-year-old Akane Nakamura is one of the country’s most famous globally known theater producers. As executive director of the theater production company Precog and the performing arts nonprofit Drifters International — which she founded in ...
Just three years ago, in 2009, Yukio Shiba burst to stardom at age 27 with his masterful first play, “Waga Hoshi” (“Our Planet”), which premiered in Tokyo and the following year scooped Japanese contemporary theater’s prestigious Kishida Kunio Award. “Up until then, even in ...
Bando Mitsugoro X (born Hisashi Morita, 56) succeeded to his current stage name 11 years ago, after the death of his father Mitsugoro IX. He was rigorously trained in Kabuki acting and dancing by his father, who had learned the trade under the renowned ...
Ballet lovers faced a difficult choice this week when two productions of “Don Quixote” were performed in Tokyo. The shows heralded the opening of the 13th World Ballet Festival, whose main program began Thursday and closes with a Special Gala on Aug. 16. Fans ...
