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The consumption tax increase next April will hit every household in Japan hard, with many people's financial future hanging on whether their wages rise enough to offset the impact of the hike, experts say.
Every parent is all too familiar with The Tantrum. The screaming, the flailing arms, the angry head butting — and the timing (normally in the most inconvenient public place possible).
International events undermine Japan's democracy. Shame on the International Olympic Committee for being a party to it.
Tucked away behind the main museums in Ueno, the Tokyo University Art Museum may not be on most people’s radar, but it is definitely one of the city’s top museums in terms of curatorial quality. Whenever I go there, I am always delighted by ...
Francisco Liriano showed up at PNC Park on Tuesday afternoon in a suit with his suitcase packed for a trip St. Louis. The message reverberated through the Pittsburgh Pirates clubhouse. After 21 years away from the playoffs, it was time for the best story ...
As summer approaches with the misty other-worldliness of Japan’s rainy season, Tokyo’s K-Ballet graces the stage in June with a revival of the hauntingly romantic masterpiece “Giselle.” Six different ballerinas will perform the lead role as the production synthesizes K-Ballet’s changing image from a ...
Claude Regy says the team at the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) threw him the “best birthday party ever” when he arrived in Japan just days after the actual May 1 occasion. The 90-year-old French director is hoping for an even better birthday gift, ...
Sitting in an interview room at the Bunkamura cultural complex in Tokyo's Shibuya district, María Pagés leans forward, smiles and tells me: "Flamenco is my language."
If anyone understands the truth in the phrase, “It doesn’t hurt to ask” — it’s Alexandra Rutter. The 23-year-old cofounder and artistic director of Whole Hog Theatre (WHT) is also the director of the first-ever adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 anime masterpiece, “Princess Mononoke.” ...
Ask your average Japanese person or non-native Japanophile to name a “traditional” form of domestic theater and the classics such as kabuki and noh would feature prominently.
Ahead of their current Taiwan tour, Yuzuki Reon, the current top otokoyaku (male-role actress) with the Takarazuka Revue, took time out between rehearsals at the city-center Tokyo Takarazuka Theater to share with readers of The Japan Times something of her view from such a ...
Always keen to break new ground, Keiko Miyata, artistic director of the New National Theatre Tokyo (NNTT), has created a series titled “With: linking theater” as the centerpiece of this season’s program. In this, she has lined up three appetizing collaborations by asking playwrights ...
“If I thought too much about my future plans, I would kind of get stuck,” says Natsumi Abe. “So I just try to concentrate on the next day’s work and do it as well as I can.” It’s a serious statement on work ethic, ...
The Kabukiza is back — with big ambitions and aspirations to make the nation’s classical theatrical entertainment more attractive to a 21st-century audience. The reopened kabuki theater — now reconstructed for the fifth time — in the upscale shopping-entertainment district of Ginza, will roll ...
“Sumidagawa Hana no Goshozome” (“The Sumida River Adorned with Cherry Blossoms”) by Tsuruya Namboku IV (1755-1829), now showing at the National Theater of Japan, was written to be a blockbuster. It was created for the Ichimura-za theater in Edo in 1814, when kabuki was ...
The play begins with Matsuwaka (Nakamura Hayato, 19) of the Kyoto-based Yoshida family. He is disguised as Yorikuni of the Otomo family, who is the fiance to princess Sakurahime (Nakamura Kotaro, 19) of the Iruma family. Sakurahime is also the younger sister of Matsukawa’s ...
If you had a son or daughter who announced they wanted to be a stage actor, whatever would you say to them? In Japan today, as in centuries past, this still remains a dreaded scenario for many “respectable” parents hoping to raise children who ...