Donald Richie - The Japan Times

November 01, 2025

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Donald Richie

Donald Richie began writing regularly for The Japan Times in 1954, initially writing film and stage reviews. In the early '70s he began writing book reviews and continued contributing until 2009. He wrote more than 40 books on Japanese aesthetics, and he is widely considered the pre-eminent expert on Japanese cinema.

CULTURE / Film

Dec 7, 2013

The Japan Times review of 'Ukigusa (Floating Weeds),' Nov. 26, 1959

'Ukigusa" is the latest film of Yasujiro Ozu, the director whom most Japanese consider "the most Japanese director."

CULTURE / Film

Jan 17, 2013

Donald Richie on 'Koshikei (Death by Hanging)'

This review as originally published on Sunday, Jan. 28, 1968.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Oct 11, 2009

Lessons of total devotion and high cruelty

LONG ROAD HOME: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor, by Kim Yong (with Kim Suk Young). Columbia University Press, 2009, 168 pp., $24.50 (hardcover) The author of this excruciating memoir led an unquestioning life in North Korea until one of the routine checks experienced by the citizens of that...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Sep 27, 2009

Inner life of a giant revealed

REFLECTIONS IN A GLASS DOOR: Memory and Melancholy in the Personal Writings of Natsume Soseki, by Marvin Marcus. Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 2009, 268 pp., $49 (hardcover) Author of a well-received study of the biographical writings of Mori Ogai ("Paragons of the Ordinary," 1993), Marvin Marcus...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Sep 13, 2009

Road map for increasingly accessible world of Japanese cinema

JAPANESE CINEMA, by Stuart Galbraith IV. Taschen, 2009, 192 pp., 354 photographs, $29.99 (hardcover) This is a large (23.1 cm by 28.9 cm), fully illustrated account of Japanese film from its beginnings. There have now been a number of such histories, each perforce written from different perspectives...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Aug 30, 2009

The artistic influence of the East

This large and lavish volume is the catalog of an important art exhibition at the New York Guggenheim Museum that ran from Jan. 20 to April 19 this year. Since the show itself is not traveling to other venues, this excellent account of its purposes and content is now all that remains of one of the most...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Aug 16, 2009

The pure horror of Hiroshima

In 1946, just after the first anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima, "The New Yorker" magazine's Aug. 31 issue published the complete text of John Hersey's portrait of the atom bomb and its effects on the Japanese city.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Aug 2, 2009

When does popular become canonical?

Some scholars would seem to think that methodologies (systems of methods used to focus on particular areas of study) never alter. Other scholars know that the methods change as the area under study enlarges and that ways of looking at the subject are always being transformed by the subject itself.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jul 19, 2009

A bird's-eye view of Japanese arts

Books on the specifics of Japanese culture (as compared to those on cultural generalities) were not always as available as they are now. The concept of culture did not have the political intentions that are now so much a part of it. Books on the purported uniqueness of the Japanese "national character"...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jul 5, 2009

The Shanxi trilogy: films that never made it back home

Sometimes called the most significant of the current generation of Chinese film directors, Jia Zhangke (b. 1970) enjoys the distinction of never having had some of his finest work commercially shown in his own country.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jun 21, 2009

Secrets to studying Japanese film

In its field I cannot imagine a research guide more needed. For whole decades scholars have struggled simply to locate sources, even to find out what there were. Now, however, the skill and stamina of Mark Nornes and Aaron Gerow have resulted in a reference work that both illuminates and defines this...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jun 7, 2009

Apichatpong Weerasethakul: No ordinary Joe

Perhaps no Asian film director since Akira Kurosawa has received the critical attention bestowed on 39 year-old Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. His "Blissfully Yours" won a major Cannes Festival prize in 2002; "Tropical Malady," took the 2004 Jury Prize and the Tokyo FilmEx first prize; and...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

May 24, 2009

From Meiji gentleman to 'Japanese Yankee'

This curiosity (a first-person account of the writer's gradual transformation from Meiji gentleman to self-proclaimed "Japanese Yankee") was first published in 1898 (by the Congregational Church) and never again seen until now.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

May 10, 2009

Gained in translation: bringing Asian poetry to the English language

SONGS OF LOVE, MOON AND WIND: Poems From the Chinese, translated by Kenneth Rexroth, selected by Eliot Weinberger. New York: New Directions, 2009, 90 pp., $12.95 (paper)

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Apr 19, 2009

Finding the exotic, alien other

The subject of the exotic and alien other is a perennial. In Japanese literature the foreign influence is usually traced to its reappearance in a native product and the results are appraised.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Apr 5, 2009

Deciphering 'A Page of Madness'

Teinosuke Kinugasa's "A Page of Madness" ("Kurutta Ichipeiji," 1926) was long thought lost. Only some 75 years later did the discovery of the missing negative allow the picture to be finally viewed by the present generation. At the same time there emerged a critical need to evaluate it because it seemed...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Mar 22, 2009

'Arabia Deserta's' fascinating substance and glorious, unconventional style renewed

In 1876 the young Charles Doughty set out to cross the interior of the Arabian Peninsula. His goal was the "lost" city of Madain Saleh and several years were spent in what were later called his "wanderings": explorations of a terrain little known to Europeans, the discovery of the remains of the sought-for...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Mar 8, 2009

Tokyo city: living in constant flux

John Milton was of the opinion that "towered cities please us then, and the busy hum of men." Tokyo would have delighted him. Largest city in the world, it has long busily hummed. Home of the first tower (dungeon-keep of the earliest Edo castle) it now has enough towering skyscrapers for everyone.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Feb 22, 2009

Volatile and barren, yet beautiful and alluring

The Great Gobi Desert is one of the most inhospitable of all places. It covers 13 million square kilometers of Central Asia and is the land furthest removed from any sea or ocean. This results in a volatile climate, fierce winds and massive sandstorms. The few inhabitants of the place say that you can...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Feb 8, 2009

Definitive 'Record of Linji' well worth a wait of 40 years

The Linji-lu is one of the most influential of all Zen texts. Presumably a collection of the lectures and sermons of Linji Yixuan (died 866), founder of the Linji school of Chan Buddhism, it helped form the Rinzai sect of Zen in Japan.

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Mamoru Iwai, stationmaster of Keisei Ueno Station, says that, other than earthquake-proofing, the former Hakubutsukan-Dobutsuen (Museum-Zoo) Station has remained untouched.

Inside Tokyo's 'phantom' stations — and the stories they tell

By Alex K.T. Martin

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