Nobuko Tanaka - The Japan Times

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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

Dec 10, 2014

Real-life Japan caricature cuts to the quick

Tomohiro Maekawa, the 40-year-old playwright, director and founder of Tokyo's Ikiume (Buried Alive) theater company, is acclaimed in Japan's theater world for his groundbreaking sci-fi works sometimes bordering on the surreal.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Dec 3, 2014

Screen icon's son brings women's rights to the stage

"Since I was a child, I always wanted to devote my life to film as my father did," Kenta Fukasaku said during a recent chat in which his late, great role model, the charismatic movie director Kinji Fukasaku, often figured.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Nov 19, 2014

Emoto's 'Shrew' questions to provoke

"If I were a man doing the same work, no one would make any special mention of my gender, but I find I'm always being referred to by the media as 'the female director, Junko Emoto.' I don't want to say that's right or wrong, but it reminds me that this is today's reality," the Tokyo-based artist said during our recent conversation about her upcoming contribution to the Owl Spot Shakespeare Festival.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Oct 29, 2014

High drama at Festival/Tokyo

News in March that 38-year-old Chiaki Soma had suddenly been removed from the post of program director of Festival/Tokyo, which she had held since it started in 2009, set many theater lovers worrying about the future of the flagship drama event whose stature at home and abroad had only grown with her at the helm.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Oct 22, 2014

Japan's 'unknown' record-breakers eye high-tech horizons on stage and off

Siro-A is going where no Japanese performing artists have gone before, as the all-action troupe this month launched into not its first, or second — but its third three-month West End run since its "Technodelic Visual Show" in 2013.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Oct 8, 2014

Noda's 'Half Gods' powers up in all-Korean revival

In July 2009, Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre's strategic relaunch with an artistic director in place of the suits who formerly oversaw its bookings was somewhat muted.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Oct 1, 2014

Kafka's worm takes a high-tech turn

"I work a lot in France, where manga and anime are enormously popular, although many theater producers think they are basically for children and are often too violent. However, they regard my robot theater as being an essentially Japanese art form," the pioneering dramatist Oriza Hirata said recently during a break in rehearsals for his upcoming version of Franz Kafka's absurdist gem, "The Metamorphosis."

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Sep 24, 2014

As festival's renown goes global, director hails its local role

Since its launch in 2010, Kyoto Experiment has steadily come to rival, if not even surpass, Festival/Tokyo as the nation's leading annual showcase for cutting-edge performances.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Sep 10, 2014

Nagatsuka probes into Pinter's 'Betrayal'

"During the 2010 Tokyo run of my play 'Anti-clockwise Wonderland,' I held a reading workshop of 'Betrayal.' That set me thinking I'd like to act one of the men in the love-triangle drama. So now at last I find myself doing that — and directing as well," Keishi Nagatsuka said in a recent interview with The Japan Times.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Sep 3, 2014

'Hamlet' marks take #18 in Shakespeare for Children series

"When I acted a nursemaid in 'Romeo and Juliet' in the first program of this Shakespeare for Children series, I was surprised that no children made fun of a man in that role — they naturally accepted that theater is fundamentally fiction and just enjoyed the play," Seisuke Yamasaki recalled in a recent interview.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Aug 27, 2014

SGT's oldies take dance in stride

In 2006, when the world-renowned director Yukio Ninagawa announced open auditions for Saitama Gold Theatre — a project he launched with the slogan, "If you are over 55, let's create theater together and go on a foreign tour" — there were cynics eager to brand the applicants as dreamy wannabe Cinderellas or deluded Don Quixote types.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Aug 20, 2014

'Babel' dance speaks volumes

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet have lots in common.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Jul 30, 2014

Emoto brothers' 'Godot' looks set to startle

"First off, we probably used to think we were too young to do 'Waiting for Godot,' because it's sometimes uncomfortable talking like gnarled old men," 27-year-old Tasuku Emoto said during a recent Japan Times interview with him and his younger brother Tokio, 24, who will play the central roles in Tokyo Kandenchi's upcoming production of the absurdist masterpiece by Ireland's 1968 Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Jul 23, 2014

'Cuckoo's Nest' still flies in the face of oppression

Among the astonishing outburst of new American cinema in the 1970s, Milos Forman's multi-Oscar-winning "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" offered most Japanese moviegoers their first encounter with the peculiarly piercing eyes of Jack Nicholson, who played its central character, Randle P. McMurphy.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Jul 16, 2014

Europe rewards edgy dramatists

Tim Etchells, artistic director of Forced Entertainment, the English company whose "The Coming Storm" was a highlight of last year's Festival/Tokyo, told me then that they now play abroad more than at home — mainly because festival organizers pay their costs. In contrast, producers are loathe to take any financial risk on non-mainstream works, he said.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Jul 9, 2014

Lessons of suicidal Cowra breakout remain unlearned

At around 2 a.m. on Saturday, Aug. 5, 1944, 1,104 Japanese soldiers and sailors armed only with knives, forks and a few baseball bats poured out of their huts at the Cowra prisoner-of-war camp 300 km west of Sydney in the Australian state of New South Wales. Charging through a hail of machine-gun fire, they stormed the gates — driven by the Imperial Military Regulation that ordered: "Never live to experience the shame of being taken prisoner."

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Jul 9, 2014

'Blast!' comes marching back with a '' from its Tokyo drummer

"It was my hugely fortunate destiny to come across 'Blast!' and, as I am 39 this year, I would like to perform it with a heartfelt '39' message [because, in Japanese, three is san and nine is kyu, which is phonetically 'thank you']," Tokyo-born percussionist, composer and performing director Naoki Ishikawa declared with passion.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Jun 18, 2014

Female dramatists dispel gender concern

Last month in Berlin, in a conversation with Annemie Vanackere, artistic director at the city's cutting-edge Hebbel am Ufer company, she was saying how she loved contemporary Japanese theater, and how HAU had worked with several Japanese dramatists. Then she suddenly asked me: "Why were they all men? Are there any great women playwrights or directors there?"

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Jun 11, 2014

Top young dramatist urges theater toward key role in nation's cultural life

Fifteen months ago, when I interviewed Takahiro Fujita as the most prominent newcomer in Japan's contemporary theater world, the playwright and director declared, "I'm always looking for something new, and I suppose I will always carry on doing that."

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

Jun 4, 2014

Chocolatecake are no sweeties

Its name translates as Chocolatecake Theatre Company, but there's nothing self-indulgent about topics Gekidan Chocolatecake gets its teeth into.

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How 'Reiwa moms' are reshaping motherhood in Japan

By Mai Yoshikawa

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