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April 28, 2025
 

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Mark Schilling
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Apr 9, 2010
'Yukai Rhapsody (The Accidental Kidnapper)'
Hollywood constantly remakes and reworks its old product — "Avatar" references everything from "Dances with Wolves" to the Tarzan movies — but sometimes it falls out of love with stories, even ones once widely popular.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Apr 2, 2010
There's always a missing piece
The daughter of actor/director Eiji Okuda and sister of actress Sakura Ando, 28-year-old Momoko Ando has a deeply international background, including a nine-year stay in Britain, as well as thorough fluency in English. In person she was also articulate, straightforward, and gracious enough to give The...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Apr 2, 2010
'Kakera (A Piece Of Our Life)'
Sexual orientation is often defined in black-and-white terms: You're either straight or gay — or kidding yourself. Author Gore Vidal has famously objected to this binary classification, claiming that there's no such thing as homosexuality, only homosexual acts.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 19, 2010
'Hana no Ato (After the Flowers)'/'Hanbun no Tsuki ga Noboru Sora'
Women have been wielding swords in Japanese period actioners for decades now, from the days when Junko Fuji and Meiko Kaji were slicing up bad guys, Fuji with stoic grace, Kaji with icy rage.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 12, 2010
Yazaki opens up about 'Lies'
A leader of Japanese cinema's 1990s New Wave, Hitoshi Yazaki dropped off the radar for more than a decade, returning in 2006 with "Strawberry Shortcakes," a widely praised drama about four lonely women in search of, not just a partner, but reasons for living. In his new film, "Sweet Little Lies," the...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 12, 2010
'Sweet Little Lies'
Marriages are strange creatures. They can die suddenly, when from the outside everything seems fine, or they can linger on for years when it's obvious to everyone, including the two principals, that it's all over.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 5, 2010
'Gekijo-ban Kenka Bancho: Zenkoku Seiha'
Fights were a spectator sport at my rural Pennsylvania high school. One guy would call out another and after classes the combatants would square off on a patch of ground outside school property, surrounded by a circle of friends and hangers-on. The typical finish was the victor straddling the prostrate...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 26, 2010
'Ningen Shikkaku'/'Saru Lock the Movie'
Based on Osamu Dazai's most famous novel, Genjiro Arato's "Ningen Shikkaku" ("The Fallen Angel") is a characteristic gamble for the veteran producer/ director, known for rushing in where others fear to tread.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 19, 2010
'Parade'
How much do we really know about anyone? This thought, the basis of many a paranoid delusion, is grounded in a human fact: We are all locked inside our own heads, communicating only a small fraction of our thoughts and feelings to others, when we are not actively misrepresenting them.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media
Feb 14, 2010
An 'eroduction' to Japan's saucy cinema
The Nikkatsu studio is the Japanese film industry's oldest — it will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2012. In the 1950s and early 1960s it was also a box-office leader, turning out hit after hit with Japan's biggest postwar star, Yujiro Ishihara. By the 1970s, however, Nikkatsu and the rest of the...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 12, 2010
'Shokudo Katatsumuri'
Movies about women in crisis who find their mojo through the restaurant/food business are a thriving subgenre in Japanese films, from Naoko Ogigami's Japanese-soul-food-in-Helsinki hit "Kamome Shokudo" ("Seagull Restaurant," 2006) to Mitsuhiro Mihara's "Shiawase no Kaori" ("Flavor of Happiness," 2008)...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 5, 2010
'Kazura'/'Boys on the Run'
The odds of two brilliant Japanese comedies opening the same day are high but not impossible, somewhat like the odds of the same director (James Cameron) making two all-time worldwide box-office hits ("Titanic" and that other film about blue aliens).
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 29, 2010
'Golden Slumber'/'Ototo'
Yoshihiro Nakamura has made a mix of indie and commercial films, from the multilayered, end-of-the-world thriller "Fish Story" (2008) to the hospital mystery "General Rouge no Gaisen" ("The Triumphant General Rouge," 2009). Whatever the subject, he always injects his personal obsessions, from the shape-shifting...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 15, 2010
'Kondo wa Aisaika'
Japanese film marriages are as diverse as the real things, ranging from the uncommunicative couple of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Tokyo Sonata" (2008) to the doting pair of the "Tsuri Baka Nisshi" ("Dairy of a Fishing Fool") series (1988-2009), though the easy-going wife of the fishing-mad salaryman hero has...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 8, 2010
A feast for film buffs
The Japanese film industry, at least the top end where Toho and its media partners dwell, is looking forward to a prosperous 2010, with a lineup of crowd-pleasers that should thump the Hollywood competition.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 8, 2010
' Bandage'
Shunji Iwai was once Japan's hottest young director following the smash success of "Love Letter," a 1995 film about a woman who writes a letter to her dead lover — and gets a reply.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 25, 2009
' Higanjima'
Hollywood likes its action movies fast and furious, their plot lines reducible to a phrase.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 18, 2009
'Snow Prince'
An anonymous poster on 2Channel — Japan's popular message-board site — once listed the elements that make for a successful Japanese melodrama as 1. Children 2. Animals 3. Poverty 4. Sickness, and 5. Death.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 18, 2009
Back to basic instincts
Mamoru Oshii is best known here and abroad as an anime auteur whose works, from the seminal dystopian SF "Kokaku Kidotai" ("Ghost in the Shell," 1995) to the air-action epic "Sky Crawlers" (2008), have often viewed the future of humanity through a glass darkly.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 11, 2009
A decade when Japan's cinema stood up to Hollywood menace
When I started reviewing Japanese films for The Japan Times in 1989, many of the people making and distributing them were convinced that the Hollywood juggernaut was slowly crushing them. How could they hope to compete against superior Hollywood technology and vastly larger Hollywood budgets?
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.
Japan to resist Trump efforts to form trade bloc against China
As Japan gears up for the trade talks, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba is also seeking to cushion the blow that the U.S. tariffs may have on the domestic economy.
As many as nine dead after driver plows into Vancouver festival crowd
An ambulance is parked at the site of the Lapu Lapu day festival, where a vehicle drove into a crowd killing several people in Vancouver on Saturday.
Japan’s legal system struggles to deal with AI-made child sexual abuse images
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.
How to bring up bad news in Japanese
As in other cultures, when someone shares bad news in Japanese it’s best to respond with supportive words.
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.
Built in a flash, Osaka Expo pavilions wrestle with sustainability
Kengo Kuma & Associates oversaw the construction of the Malaysia pavilion, which is encased in interwoven rows of bamboo that appear to ripple.
Japan weighs using U.S. rice imports as tariff negotiation tool with Trump
A restaurant owner pours California-grown Calrose rice into a rice cooker at his restaurant in Tokyo
Is Japan’s parliament ready to welcome more youth to its ranks?
Lower House lawmaker Kai Odake in his Tokyo office on Wednesday
Crow meat, goat tartare: Mauvaise Herbe raises its game
Crow meat, shaped into a ball and attached to a foot of the bird, is one of the peculiar offerings of game at Mauvaise Herbe.

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Longform

Visitors walk past Sou Fujimoto's Grand Ring, which has been recognized as the largest wooden structure in the world.
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By Tomoko Otake

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