Damian Flanagan - The Japan Times

CULTURE / Books / The critics who shaped modern Japan

Sep 2, 2017

Hideo Kobayashi: Spearheading the age of the professional critic

In the autumn of 1956, Japan's most renowned literary critic, the 54-year-old Hideo Kobayashi, engaged in taidan ( a "conversation" to be published in a magazine) with 31-year-old rising literary star Yukio Mishima.

COMMUNITY / Voices / FOREIGN AGENDA

Aug 27, 2017

How a love of Japan led me to stop dating its women

A British academic concludes that the only way he can truly enjoy and develop his love for Japan is by excluding his love life from the equation.

CULTURE / Books / The critics who shaped modern Japan

Aug 5, 2017

Junichiro Tanizaki: Speaking to the light from the shadows

In 1933, when Junichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) published his short but landmark essay "In Praise of Shadows," it could hardly be seen as anything other than a riposte to the "enlightening" agenda of the great cultural critic Fukuzawa Yukichi of the preceding Meiji Era (1868-1912).

COMMUNITY / Voices / FOREIGN AGENDA

Jul 19, 2017

To find the joys of 'real Japan,' get on your bike

Japanese society and culture seem intrinsically suited to bicycles, which require a degree of safety of environment and intimacy that are alien to many thunderously car-based, brash and crime-ridden Western societies.

CULTURE / Books / ESSENTIAL READING FOR JAPANOPHILES

Jul 8, 2017

'The Sea and Poison': Shusaku Endo dissects the human capacity for evil

This 1957 novel has at its heart Shusaku Endo's fascination with a seemingly tranquil and civilized postwar Japan still traumatized by the horrors of the Pacific War. Even a harmless-looking gas station attendant might be a grizzled war veteran involved in brutal killings on the front line little more than a decade before.

CULTURE / Books / The critics who shaped modern Japan

Jul 1, 2017

Yukichi Fukuzawa: A cultural critic truly ahead of his time

Ask just about anyone with a keen interest in Japan to name their favorites from the nation's rich literary history and they are likely to rattle off a few famous names. But ask the same person for their favorite Japanese critics, and stony silence is likely to ensue.

COMMUNITY / Voices / FOREIGN AGENDA

Jun 28, 2017

Japan — where the suburbs meet utopia

After flirtations with city and country, a roaming suburban boy finds that true bliss lies somewhere in between.

CULTURE / Film

Jun 17, 2017

The extraordinary untold Japan story of 'You Only Live Twice'

On the 50th anniversary of the premiere of the fifth 'James Bond' film in Japan, we explore spy rings in Tokyo, a secretive Sherlock Holmes society and an Australian double agent behind 007's Japanese adventure.

CULTURE / Books

May 27, 2017

'Record of a Night Too Brief': Hiromi Kawakami uncoils life's mysteries with an exploration of dreams

When I met the popular author Hiromi Kawakami in London recently, I asked her thoughts about the great authors of Japan's literary past. Did she, for example, enjoy the novels of Meiji Era (1868-1912) great Natsume Soseki?

CULTURE / Books

Apr 15, 2017

'The Book of the Dead': The first complete translation of Shinobu Orikuchi's classic

Both influential and deeply mysterious, "The Book of the Dead" ("Shisha no Sho," 1943) is the most famous work of fiction by Shinobu Orikuchi (1887-1953), a pioneer of folklore studies in Japan and renowned poet. Orikuchi was fascinated with the origins of Japanese religion and the connections between spirit possession and the role of an emperor as a mediator between the gods and the Japanese people.

LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL

Apr 3, 2017

門: Your 'gate' to understanding Japan

The word 'gate' lurks deep in the Japanese psyche. So central is the word to Japanese thinking that at least 50 kanji incorporate it.

COMMUNITY / Voices / FOREIGN AGENDA

Mar 29, 2017

The psychological perils of a Japanese homestay

All the homestays I have done in my life — three of them — were psychologically traumatic in uniquely torturous ways.

CULTURE / Books

Jan 21, 2017

The triumphant second coming of Endo's 'Silence'

Martin Scorsese's adaptation of "Silence," Shusaku Endo's tale of Catholic missionaries suffering brutal repression in 17th-century Japan, has met with mixed reviews. Some have found it ponderously overlong and, for those unfamiliar with Japanese history, baffling in context. It is, in fact, not a minute too long — agony and anguish can't be rushed — and well worth the 25-year wait. Scorsese spent decades trying to realize this "passion project," overcoming numerous production difficulties and legal wrangles along the way.

CULTURE / Books

Jan 14, 2017

Mishima and the maze of sexuality in modern Japan

In June 1948, novelist Osamu Dazai committed suicide. The 38-year-old, who had just completed his masterpiece, "No Longer Human," and whose fame was peaking, jumped into Tokyo's Tamagawa Canal with his mistress, Tomie Yamazaki, and drowned.

LIFE / Travel

Dec 17, 2016

Natsume Soseki and 'The Orient's No. 1 Elevator'

What is the top tourist destination in the Kansai region? Is it Kyoto's geisha district? Is it the temples and bamboo forests of Arashiyama? Is it the town of Yoshino, with Japan's most famous cherry blossoms? The majestic views from Mount Rokko in Kobe? Or Lake Biwa, the country's largest freshwater lake? The list goes on and on, but it's doubtful that Wakanoura, a small coastal town near the city of Wakayama, would come to mind.

CULTURE / Books

Dec 17, 2016

Love, obsession and perverted desires in Japan's age of steam

Japan began to open its doors to the West in the 1850s, after centuries of remaining closed. In the following decade, foreigners' "concessions" were established in port cities such as Yokohama and Kobe to cope with the new visitors. The Japanese, with their characteristic desire to extend guests every hospitality, quickly discovered that the foreigners had very different tastes in food, music, alcoholic drinks — and sex. Brothels were hastily constructed to satisfy newcomers' lust for Japanese women, but the foreigners looked askance at the same-sex relationships with boys that had been common practice in Japan.

CULTURE / Books

Nov 26, 2016

The hidden heart of Natsume Soseki

Dec. 9 marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), a novelist widely regarded as being the one of the greatest writers of modern Japan. Events commemorating this anniversary have been held throughout 2016 but, in case you think it will all be over by Christmas, another milestone will be celebrated in 2017 — the 150th anniversary of his birth.

CULTURE / Books

Nov 19, 2016

The shifting sexual norms in Japan's literary history

More than 3,000 women and almost 900 men — that's the number of lovers the main protagonist in Ihara Saikaku's 1682 novel "Koshoku Ichidai Otoko" ("The Life of an Amorous Man") tallies up as he reminisces. Saikaku, born in Osaka in 1642, became a renowned poet who wrote about the fluid, open sexuality of Edo Period (1603-1868) pleasure quarters with a startling lack of inhibition: In the 1685 collection of stories "Koshoku Gonin Onna" ("Five Women Who Loved Love"), he explores the love lives of feisty females; in "Koshoku Ichidai Onna" ("The Life of an Amorous Woman"), published in 1686, he includes a brief lesbian scene; and then there is "Nanshoku Okagami" ("The Great Mirror of Male Love"), a 1687 collection that focuses exclusively on love between men.

LIFE / Travel

Nov 5, 2016

Kofu: the mountain fortress of warlord Takeda Shingen

In Akira Kurosawa's classic 1980 film "Kagemusha" ("Shadow Warrior"), the 16th-century daimyo Takeda Shingen is mortally wounded by a sniper after being lured by the sound of a flute during a castle siege. Takeda's clan know that rival warlords Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu will pounce on their domain once they realize he is dead, so a look-a-like is installed in his place to maintain the deception that he is alive. The domain they are desperately trying to protect was called Kai and its former capital is the city of Kofu in modern-day Yamanashi Prefecture.

LIFE / Travel

Oct 8, 2016

The 'onsen' retreat that transformed Natsume Soseki

Shuzenji, an onsen (hot-spring) town in the heart of the Izu Peninsula, is a little piece of heaven. Nestled in the densely wooded hills of Shizuoka Prefecture, its collection of baths, guesthouses and shops line up on either side of the rushing Katsura River, with historic temples, shrines and bamboo groves in the surrounding forests.

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