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May 14, 2024
 

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Nobuko Tanaka

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Nobuko Tanaka
Nobuko Tanaka is a stage writer who has regularly contributed contemporary theater and dance articles to The Japan Times since 2001. She also writes for several Japanese and overseas magazines and web sites. As a promoter, she takes Japanese artists to foreign theater festivals.
For Nobuko Tanaka's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Feb 25, 2016
Cultural differences over suicide made for an interesting creative process in 'Eternal Chikamatsu'
In 2014, rising playwright and director Kenichi Tani translated Harold Pinter's "Old Times" for an all-Japanese production by top English director David Leveaux staged that year in Tokyo and Osaka. After that, Leveaux asked Tani, 33, to write a new contemporary play for him based on "Shinju Ten no Amijima" ("The Love Suicide at Amijima"), a famous shinjū (love suicide) drama from 1720 by the renowned playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725).
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Feb 23, 2016
Zainichi dramas delve into Japan's shadows
“At last, the masterpiece 'Yakiniku Dragon' ('Korean Barbecue Dragon') is going to be staged again!"
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jan 28, 2016
Opera Theater Konnyakuza perfects a union of stage and song
The world of opera has always found inspiration in the works of William Shakespeare, but adapting them for the stage requires flexibility.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jan 26, 2016
Theater academy pulls no punches
In a rehearsal studio at the Za-Koenji theater in west-central Tokyo's Koenji district, trainee actress Yuuhi Suenobu was striving to act the role of a frightened young woman wandering aimlessly in a chaotic wasteland with her injured mother.
CULTURE / Stage
Jan 26, 2016
TPAM by any other name still aims to build a major Asian platform for the performing arts
With the 2020 Tokyo Olympics waiting in the wings, and memories still fresh of the hugely successful four-year Cultural Olympiad culminating in the London 2012 Festival staged there alongside the Olympic Games, the pressure is on Japan's leading annual cultural events not to be found wanting in comparison.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jan 23, 2016
'Crazy Camel' helps butoh over the hump
'Many people have a preconception about butoh — that it is performed by dancers whose bodies are painted white. So when we debuted our current program, 'Crazy Camel,' in France, and we came on stage covered in gold-colored powder, the fans and experts there thought we were pioneering a new style," 72-year-old butoh master Akaji Maro says in a recent email interview. "In fact, this gold-powdered showy performance style has existed as a cabaret-show flip side of orthodox butoh since not long after the genre was started in 1959. It was developed by two trailblazers — Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-86) and Kazuo Ohno (1906-2010)."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jan 14, 2016
Takehiro Hira steps into a 19th-century affair in the award-winning 'Kaku Onna'
Tokyo was bathed in warm sunshine in the run-up to 2016, and when Takehiro Hira meets me at a rehearsal studio his smile is beaming just as brightly — while in his arms he's carrying a box of mikan (mandarin oranges) to share with the rest of the team as they prepare for this month's rerun of Ai Nagai's acclaimed "Kaku Onna" ("A Writing Woman").
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jan 14, 2016
Tao takes an innovative approach to drum shows
The slogan goes, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas." Drum troupe Tao, however, thinks a successful show in Sin City could be the springboard to bigger things around the world.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jan 7, 2016
'Boys over Flowers' blooms on stage
'One Piece," a new, modern entertainment-focused "Super Kabuki" play based on an eponymous manga series by Eiichiro Oda, closed last month after a hit Tokyo run that showed beyond doubt that manga-based productions are not the preserve of movies and television — where they have long been popular fare — but they can successfully translate to the live stage, too.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Dec 22, 2015
Plenty of food for thought in a good year for great plays
The year now ending began gloomily with the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris reminding us of hopeless breakdowns in mutual understanding and tolerance worldwide; now it's set to close hot on the heels of an agreement by nearly 200 countries at the COP21 talks in Paris on the need to counter threatened apocalyptic levels of climate change due to global warming.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Oct 27, 2015
Japan-Korea dramas shine
Festival/Tokyo, which bills itself as "Japan's leading performing-arts event," is notable this year for its international collaborations — especially between Japanese and Korean dramatists, whose works comprise three of the 12 main programs in its Oct. 31-Dec. 6 span.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Oct 15, 2015
Theater legend Harold Prince brings 'Prince of Broadway' to Japan for a world premiere
With a smile beaming from his face, Broadway legend Harold Prince enters the room I'm waiting in and cheerfully declares, "I'm not jet-lagged at all — they're just working me to death."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Sep 24, 2015
Dramatist Robert Lepage's 'Needles and Opium' gets a shot of modernity
Variously described as "the alchemist of modern imagistic theatre" and a "revered actor and director" by The Guardian, Robert Lepage's hyper-imaginative, highly visual work for theater, films and Cirque du Soleil stands out so much that the term "Lepage magic" has even become part of the arts vocabulary.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Sep 22, 2015
'Top Hat' musical takes film classic to happy new heights
"There may be trouble ahead / But while there's moonlight and music /
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Aug 25, 2015
'Soma' project dances over divides
If you took a handful of aspiring Japanese contemporary dancers and blended them with a few members of Tanztheater Wuppertal — the world-famous German troupe formed in 1973 by the modern dance icon Pina Bausch (1940-2009) — what kinds of artistic chemistry would you get?
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Aug 20, 2015
Shun Oguri faces off with an artistic master in 'Red'
'If it's possible, I'd like to act live on stage at least once a year," says film and television star Shun Oguri following an intensive rehearsal at a small studio in central Tokyo.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 21, 2015
New 'Troilus and Cressida' looks like it's making history
Renowned as a problem play due to its tangled ambiguities and a storyline that cries out for a catharsis, "Troilus and Cressida" is among the most rarely staged of William Shakespeare's 37 plays.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 9, 2015
Tackling the Bard's world in one go: Kuranosuke Sasaki teams up with director Andrew Goldberg for a one-man 'Macbeth'
With a piercing yell, Kuranosuke Sasaki bursts out of the rehearsal studio, his hands covered in (fake) blood. Then seeing me, he smiles and says, "Sorry to keep you waiting" — before returning to intensive preparations with American director Andrew Goldberg for his starring role in their one-man "Macbeth," which opens July 12 at Tokyo's Parco Theater.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jun 23, 2015
Young British directors take Tokyo by storm — but why?
This year it's quite noticeable how many non-Japanese are directing plays in Tokyo — not frequent and famed visitors such as David Leveaux, Robert Lepage and Simon McBurney, but relative unknowns here making their debuts at two leading large commercial theaters that almost always feature Japanese dramatists.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
May 26, 2015
'Newcomer,' 56, wins Kishida
Named after a prominent early 20th-century playwright, author and translator, and presented annually by the Hakusuisha publishing house since 1955, the Kishida Kunio Drama Award is indisputably Japan's top honor for writers of plays premiered the year before.
Japanese stripper bids to have her porn movies taken off internet
Plaintiff Miyuki Ariga (left) speaks at a news conference along with her lawyer, Yoshitomo Morohashi, after filing a lawsuit at the Tokyo District Court on Monday.
Three men rearrested over brokering of overseas prostitution
A woman speaks of her experience of being sent to Macau by an overseas prostitution broker during an interview in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward on April 8.
Ex-METI bureaucrat given 10-year sentence for drugging and raping women
The Tokyo District Court on Monday sentenced a former industry ministry bureaucrat to 10 years in prison for drugging six women with sleeping pills and then raping or groping them in 2022.
Money stolen via online transfers up fivefold in Tokyo
Special fraud cases in Tokyo in which stolen money was sent via online banking services grew some fivefold from the previous year in 2023.
How the discovery of a giant sword in Nara offers clues into ancient Japan
Archaeologists say a 1,600-year-old wooden coffin at the Tomio Maruyama tumulus in the city of Nara was kept in good condition probably because it was protected by a layer of clay and copper ions that had seeped out of the mirrors that were buried together.
In a rare event, the Northern Lights show up in Hokkaido
The Northern Lights in Nayoro, Hokkaido, on Saturday
Is black the new green for Japan’s flagging tea farmers?
George Guttridge-Smith brews tea at Kyoto Obubu Tea Farm in Wazuka, Kyoto Prefecture, where he serves as head of international development.
Japan's logistics firms seek partnerships to cope with driver shortage
Japan Post CEO Tetsuya Senda (right) and his Seino Transportation counterpart Satoshi Takahashi announce their companies' agreement on joint long-haul truck operations, in Tokyo on Thursday.
How the discovery of a giant sword in Nara offers clues into ancient Japan
Archaeologists say a 1,600-year-old wooden coffin at the Tomio Maruyama tumulus in the city of Nara was kept in good condition probably because it was protected by a layer of clay and copper ions that had seeped out of the mirrors that were buried together.
Unlike 10 years ago, Japan's new security bill sparks little debate
The Lower House starts discussing a security clearance bill on April 19 in Tokyo.

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