Economy | ANALYSIS
Households to take hit from tax hike
by Tomoko Otake
The consumption tax increase will hit every household in Japan hard, with many people’s financial future hanging on whether their wages rise enough to offset the hike's impact.
Film Sep 26, 2013
Actor-director Okuda revisits wreckage of 3/11
by Mark Schilling
Actors see how directors do their job — and not a few imagine they can do it better. But the number of Japanese actors who move successfully into the director’s chair is small.
Film Sep 5, 2013
Kobayashi film explores Japan's suicide problem
by Mark Schilling
A folk-singer-turned-filmmaker who went to France in 1981 to apprentice under his idol François Truffaut, Masahiro Kobayashi may have failed in his quest (he couldn’t work up the courage to press Truffaut’s doorbell), but after returning to Japan became a prolific scriptwriter for pinku ...
Film Aug 15, 2013
When young creators answer the big city's siren call
by Mark Schilling
Veteran scriptwriter and director Toshiyuki Morioka had more than a professional interest in making his new film “Jokyo Monogatari.” Based on an autobiographical manga by Rieko Saibara, its story of an aspiring artist coming to Tokyo to learn her trade and make her fortune ...
Film Jul 25, 2013
Spirits linger in the trinkets of Hiroshima's dead
by Kaori Shoji
They say most people have one or more defining childhood incidents — something that sets the course of their adult life and molds their personality. Filmmaker Linda Hoaglund had one, and it was so striking that to this day she can still remember the ...
Film Jun 28, 2013
Documenting Japan's 'strange' election campaigns
by Mark Schilling
A native of Tochigi Prefecture and a graduate of the University of Tokyo, where he majored in religious studies, Kazuhiro Soda took an early turn off a conventional career path when he went to New York in 1993 to study filmmaking at the School ...
Film Jun 7, 2013
Screen violence is in the eye of the beholder
by Mark Schilling
Some people avoid violent films, while others watch little else. Professional movie reviewers, who may see hundreds of films annually, cannot afford to be so picky. If you are covering the Cannes Film Festival competition, as I did one year for the Screen International ...
Film May 17, 2013
Kat-tun star's knack for reinvention aids film role
by Mark Schilling
Director Satoshi Miki’s new comedy “Ore Ore (It’s Me, it’s Me)” is more on the cultish than the commercial end of the scale, with its head-scratcher of a story about a first-time scammer who starts encountering various versions of himself in a bizarre new ...
Film May 3, 2013
Yoshida's ode to a distant Okinawan island
by Mark Schilling
Many directors hit everything from the books to the streets in preparation for their next film, but for his second feature, “Tabidachi no Shima Uta — Jugo no Haru (Leaving on the 15th Spring),” Yasuhiro Yoshida went far further than most.
Film Apr 19, 2013
Ishikawa knows when to throw away the script
by Mark Schilling
Japanese directors of TV dramas often make films that are basically big-screen versions of small-screen shows. No surprise, since their TV-network backers want product that will work equally well with multiplex audiences and home viewers. Directors of TV commercials here, however, typically regard films ...
Film Apr 12, 2013
Funahashi: 'Good stories don't need happy endings'
by Mark Schilling
A graduate of the University of Tokyo’s cinema studies course, Atsushi Funahashi studied directing at the School of Visual Arts in New York and shot his first two films, “Echoes” (2002) and “Big River” (2005), in the United States.
Review Mar 29, 2013
'Daijobu 3kumi (Nobody's Perfect)'
by Mark Schilling
Teaching kids is usually not thought of as a physically taxing job, but take it from one who has done it: It is, especially in Japanese schools, where one teacher may have to deal with 40 bundles of not-always-well-behaved energy. I spent much of ...
Review Mar 15, 2013
'Purachina Deta (Platinum Data)'
by Mark Schilling
Why are so many Japanese sci-fi thrillers so sure our near-future rulers will try to tyrannize us, dehumanize us or, as in “Batoru Rowaiaru (Battle Royale),” make us slaughter each other, even when our only crime is possessing raging adolescent hormones? Given what I’ve ...