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Joseph Badtke-Berkow
For Joseph Badtke-Berkow's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
CULTURE / Film
Jul 20, 2007
Tokyo hosts world's top refugee film fest
The United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) counts about 33 million refugees in the world today. There is an even larger multitude saddled with the chillingly bureaucratic title "internally displaced persons."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jun 21, 2007
Soundtrack of the summer: Bi Kidude
The rich cultural history of Africa's spice islands comes to life in the gravelly, deep-throated singing of Bi Kidude. Now in her 90s (her exact age is unknown), Kidude is considered the embodiment of Zanzibari Tarab singing, a genre drawing on African, Middle Eastern and Indian sources with distinct driving rhythms and melodies played using stringed instruments from the Middle East (oud) and Japan (taisho- koto). Heralded as a living legend in Swahili-speaking East Africa, in recent decades Kidude has gained a sizable audience in Europe, the United States and Japan. This summer she arrives in Tokyo with a 15-piece orchestra for a performance on July 19 at Shibuya's C.C. Lemon Hall as part of the Arion-Edo Foundation's Tokyo Summer Festival. Given her age, this may well be the last time Japanese concertgoers will have the opportunity to see Kidude.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Apr 6, 2007
Multicultural psychosis
Eugene Hutz is a difficult man to pin down. He is rarely in the same country, let alone the same city, for more than a few weeks at a time, touring with his band Gogol Bordello across time-zones and cultures on four different continents for most of the year.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Mar 30, 2007
Up, up and away
For the length of the Occupation of Japan, from defeat in 1945 to the return of sovereignty in 1952, the skies belonged to the Allies.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Mar 9, 2007
A place apart from you
Where are the wildernesses of lore?
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 16, 2006
An upheaval of creativity
History is full of lies but, there's at least one truth you can count on: times of great upheaval and change often lead to, and are on occasion born of, great flowerings of human genius.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 19, 2006
Shomei Tomatsu retrospective traces post-war experience
At age 15 in 1945, Shomei Tomatsu was working at an aircraft assembly plant in Nagoya. U.S. B-29s were bombing the industrial city so relentlessly that by the end of World War II, nine out of 10 of its buildings were destroyed -- compared with five out of 10 in Tokyo.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 12, 2006
Fumio Nanjo's vision comes to the fore
The departure of director David Elliott from the Mori Art Museum to take over the Istanbul Modern in Turkey is the first major leadership change at Japan's largest privately endowed cultural institution. Though it was not without controversy, Elliott's tenure saw the 3-year-old museum develop into what is arguably Tokyo's most important new forum for contemporary art, and where it goes from here will be left to the incoming director, Elliott's former deputy, Fumio Nanjo.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 5, 2006
Departing director created a new platform for contemporary art in Tokyo
It would have been difficult to find a more dramatic backdrop for last week's press conference announcing that Mori Art Museum's British-born director David Elliott will be leaving after October, and that his second-in-command, Fumio Nanjo, will take over the helm of Japan's largest privately endowed art institution.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 28, 2006
Fumio Nanjo to replace David Elliott
The Mori Art Museum's director, David Elliott, will leave his post at the end of October to take a position as the new director of the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art in Turkey. The news was announced Wednesday at a press conference at Roppongi Hills, where Elliott spoke of his five years in Tokyo working as the first foreign director of a major museum in Japan, focusing especially on the three years since the Mori's opening in October 2003.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 28, 2006
Celebrating civilizations
The Islamic world is home to one of the richest and most important musical traditions on Earth. It doesn't hurt that it also spans an incredibly vast area, stretching west to Morocco and east as far as Indonesia, and that it contains an intricate tapestry of races, languages and cultures, or that it is an area where just about everything we recognize today as elemental to human civilization first arose. With music, as with so much else, people from the Islamic world have had a lot of practice.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 22, 2006
Following the father
You've probably heard of the father of Afrobeat bandmaster and award-winning musician Femi Kuti. And if by chance you haven't, you're missing out on one of Africa's greatest musical legends.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 14, 2006
Allegations of plagiarism raised by kaleidoscope installation in Echigo-Tsumari
Picasso once said, "good artists copy, great artists steal." Of course, it has never been as simple as that. Questions concerning artistic authenticity, honest or dishonest intentions and outright plagiarism have been around ever since societies began to consider artistic expression the unique product of individual artists.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 10, 2006
There's an art to saving country life
Just a few hours north of Tokyo's seemingly endless sprawl is the mountainous region of Echigo-Tsumari in Niigata Prefecture. Like so many other rural parts of northern Japan, it is a rugged, isolated, aging and economically stagnant place where elderly men and women can be found doubled over in terraced rice paddies with their hands in muck as their kind have done for 1,000 years.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jul 20, 2006
Senegal is calling
Time and again Western journalists ask superstar Senegalese pop singer Youssou N'Dour, arguably the most successful African musician in history, the same question: Why, despite selling hundreds of thousands of records in the West and collaborating with artists such as Peter Gabriel, Sting, Wyclef Jean and Paul Simon, do you continue to live in Africa?
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jun 1, 2006
"Off the Record "
Bottom floor of Shibuya's Sega Gigo game center Runs indefinitely
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 25, 2006
Art of Africa
Everyone has an idea about "Africa." Pestilence, famine and genocide top many people's lists. Others think of boundless natural wonder and sprawling metropolises bursting with life. But the truth of it is, there is no one "Africa." There are only Africans, and they defy generalization.

Longform

High-end tourism is becoming more about the kinds of experiences that Japan's lesser-known places can provide.
Can Japan lure the jet-set class off the beaten path?