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April 29, 2025
 

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Mark Schilling
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 4, 2013
Tsuchiya questions what it means to be human
I first met Yutaka Tsuchiya in 1999 when I interviewed him on the release of "Atarashii Kamisama (The New God)," his documentary centering on a rightist punk band and its charismatic lead singer, Karin Amamiya. Despite his left-leaning politics, Tsuchiya was anything but the rigid ideologue; in fact,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 4, 2013
'Thallium Shojo no Dokusatsu Nikki (GFP Bunny)'
Every once in awhile a movie sees around the corner to where the culture is heading. Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" (1971) was released when baby boomers were still baking granola and dreaming of communal peace and love, but its dystopian vision of ultra violence being visited on random strangers...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 4, 2013
'Momo no Tegami (A Letter to Momo)'
Director: Hiroyuki Okiura
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 28, 2013
'Senkyo 2 (Campaign 2)'
In the more than three decades I've lived here, I have progressed (if that is the right word) from irritation at the oddness of Japanese election campaigns to something like curiosity. How, I once wondered, could anyone choose intelligently among candidates whose "dialogue" with the voters was mostly...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 28, 2013
Documenting Japan's 'strange' election campaigns
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 of Visual Arts. After a stab at fiction filmmaking, which...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 28, 2013
'Chronicle of My Mother'
Director: Masato Harada
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 21, 2013
'Sayonara Keikoku (The Ravine of Goodbye)'
What are the limits of forgiveness? Our various gods may forgive our sins, but we humans don't always find it easy to follow suit. Violations of the body are among the crimes hardest to forgive, since the victims are left with not only scars, visible and invisible, but also a cold anger against the perpetrator(s)....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 21, 2013
'The Complete (Existing) Films of ...'
Director: Sadao Yamanaka
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 14, 2013
'Kiseki no Ringo (Miracle Apples)'
Raised on a small farm in Southern Ohio, my grandfather hunted and grew much of the food we ate at the enormous Sunday dinners my grandmother prepared, from tasty quail and rabbit to fresh sweet corn and tomatoes. The piece de resistance was often apple pie, made from fruit harvested from backyard trees....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 14, 2013
'Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story)'
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 7, 2013
Screen violence is in the eye of the beholder
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 daily critics' poll, you cannot...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 7, 2013
'Hakoiri Musuko no Koi (Blindly in Love)'
In a recent interview, Steven Soderbergh complained that critics are "too easily fooled." "Their reading of filmmaking is too superficial," he added. While I am as much a fan of deep insight as the next guy, I am also perfectly happy to be fooled. That is, if a director manages to salvage his pig of...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 7, 2013
'Satoshi Miki Collection'
Director: Satoshi Miki
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 31, 2013
Size doesn't matter: Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia celebrates 15 years
The short film gave birth to the cinema — the first narrative film, 'The Great Train Robbery' (1903), is all of 11 minutes long, but the format is now in the shadow of the full-length feature.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 31, 2013
Director Yukinori Makabe has high hopes for his 'Tokyo Sky Story' at film festival
A staffer of the Robot production house, where he has worked as an assistant director on entries in the hit "Always" and "Odoru Daisosasen (Bayside Shakedown)" series, 29-year-old Yukinori Makabe has also directed award-winning short films, including "The Sun and the Moon," which beat out 250 others...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 31, 2013
'Kuchizuke (Angel Home)'
The Japanese film industry loves medical melodramas, but not much ones with intellectually disabled characters.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 31, 2013
'Kiseki (I Wish)'
Director: Hirokazu Koreeda
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 24, 2013
'Kuroyuri Danchi (The Complex)'
Springing up like the proverbial bamboo shoots after a rain storm in the postwar boom years, when they were hailed as ideal communities for the rising middle class, Japan's danchi (public-housing projects) have since acquired a rather dark image as the older ones molder and decay and the original residents...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 24, 2013
'Saikaku Ichidai Onna (The Life of Oharu)'
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 17, 2013
KAT-TUN star's knack for reinvention aids film role
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 world: karmic payback for impersonating a stranger...
China seizes disputed reef near key Philippine military outpost
China Coast Guard officers unfurl a national flag on Sandy Cay reef, near the Philippine-held Thitu Island, in disputed waters of the South China Sea this month in this screen shot taken from Chinese state broadcaster CCTV.
If the 'Big One' hits, this city could face a 31-meter-high tsunami
A small shrine perched atop rocks braves the waves hitting the shoreline during a storm in Shimoda, Shizuoka Prefecture. The area is under threat of a possible 31-meter-high tsunami if an earthquake strikes the nearby Nankai Trough.
California says it overtakes Japan to become world’s No. 4 economy
Vehicles travel along the 110 freeway in downtown Los Angeles. California's GDP has overtaken Japan's to become the world's fourth largest economy, according to the U.S. state.
Arunima Mazumdar: ‘Japanese literature has a niche but deeply engaged readership in India’
Arunima Mazumdar, a New Delhi-based communications professional, began sharing her love of Japanese literature online in 2022. The platform has grown into a robust community known as Dokusha Book Club.
Counting the reasons why there are so few American cars in Japan
Tesla's store in Tokyo's Shibuya district. While sales of American cars in Japan appear to be shrinking, Tesla's presence in the country is growing.
Expo '25 gives the world a masterclass in mascots
2025 Osaka Expo mascot Myaku-Myaku dances on the stage during the event's official opening ceremony on April 12.
Japan struggles with gray zone of AI deepfakes exploiting children
AI-generated content — including those made using pictures of real people, which are known as “deepfakes” — is not explicitly covered under Japan's current legal framework, nor are human-drawn illustrations that depict child abuse.
‘Wildcat Dome’ challenges Japan's historical narratives
On the surface, "Wildcat Dome" tells a personal story of damaged children — now adults — bound together by tragedy. Underneath, there’s a constant undercurrent of political consequence, invisible and pervasive like radioactive particles.
Reclaiming Sanya, one meal at a time
Magokoro Yoshihira (center) is the managing director of Yui Associates, which operates the neighborhood fixtures of Sanya Cafe and Juyoh Hotel. Yusuke Takahashi (left) met Yoshihira during a difficult period in his life and now works as the cafe’s chef. Nancy Anne (right) has worked for over 10 years at Juyoh Hotel and enjoys the multicultural environment.
Amid uncertain tariffs, is now the time to buy a new iPhone?
An Apple store in Tokyo's Shibuya Ward in September. Prices for the newest iPhone models start at around ¥100,000 ($700) in Japan.

Podcast

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.
Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Longform

A small shrine perched atop rocks braves the waves hitting the shoreline during a storm in Shimoda, Shizuoka Prefecture. The area is under threat of a possible 31-meter-high tsunami if an earthquake strikes the nearby Nankai Trough.
If the 'Big One' hits, this city could face a 31-meter-high tsunami
By Alex K.T. Martin

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