For David Kracker's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Mario Cuzic used a video camera to face the question that keeps many expat English teachers up at night: What am I going to do before I head back home? His answer, "Garage Rockin' Craze," is a documentary on the history of Japan's underground ...
Zerai Naoi makes his living by keeping gore hounds fed on a shoestring budget. If you want to sample his work, it helps to have a strong stomach. The special effects artist began his career in high school and has crafted rotten body parts and ...
Photographer Hiroji Kubota believes that "everyone has a great drama to tell." With the release of his retrospective photo book, simply titled "Hiroji Kubota Photographer," now it's his turn to tell his. As the sole Japanese member of Magnum Photos, the international collective founded in ...
Moviegoers in Japan are generally expected to take a vow of silence at the cinema — unless the film happens to be "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." The musical comedy about white-bread newlyweds who stumble upon a creepy castle full of kinky humanoid aliens from ...
We now recognize the late Yasujiro Ozu as one of Japan's finest film directors, but his early works are lost to history, victims of a time when cinema was seen as disposable entertainment and not an art form worth saving. Joseph Redon doesn't want ...
Last year, animated TV show "The Simpsons" spoofed the films of director Hayao Miyazaki. This spring, bootleg Bart Simpson T-shirts line the boutiques of Harajuku. There's a weird symbiosis between Japanese pop culture and America's longest-running TV family, a force strong enough to attract more ...
Want to be a lawyer? Go to law school. A doctor? Med school. But where do you enroll if you want to learn how to fly off the top rope to deliver a brutal body slam? Japanese universities don't offer a degree in professional wrestling, ...
It's a week until Necronomidol's big show and, practicing at a dance studio in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward, the four members make a decision to change one line from "We've come to bring about the Apocalypse" to "We've come to enact Armageddon." Manager Ricky Wilson ...
At the end of the 1980s, British DJs imported a potent new style of house music from the Spanish party island Ibiza in what came to be known as the ecstasy-fueled "Second Summer of Love." Inspired by this trade route two decades later, Katsumi ...
