For Matthew Carland's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
The late Toshiko Ishikawa Hilliker, a Hiroshima native who immigrated to the United States about 15 years after World War II, started to open up later in life about being a hibakusha who lived through the decimation of her home city on Aug. 6, ...
Toronto native Katsura Sunshine has experienced setbacks as a rakugo storyteller, the 400-year-old Japanese comedic art form, but he has not given up on a long-held dream to build a rakugo theater in the Big Apple. Sunshine, who studied the traditional and unique form of ...
Following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that claimed 17 lives in early 2018, Japanese filmmaker Emily Taguchi and her team spent months with members of the grieving community, documenting their recovery and activism in the wake of ...
A re-enactment in New York of Korematsu v. United States, a 1944 Supreme Court case that upheld the wartime incarceration of some 120,000 Japanese-Americans, was recently staged with a new ending that takes into account the court's decision to overrule the notorious decision last ...
When the Rev. Kenjitsu Nakagaki was honoring the Buddha's birthday with a sacred flower ceremony at a Seattle shrine in 1986, the Buddhist monk was met with sharp criticism for the chrysanthemums he arranged in the shape of a counterclockwise swastika. Nakagaki, then 25 and ...
An American survivor of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack in New York who reached out to the Tohoku region following the triple disaster in 2011 has for years fostered a unique bond with its people, finding the connection mutually beneficial in coping with ...
Although Alexis Sanborn was a self-professed Japanese-culture geek as a teenager, she never had much of an appetite for washoku (Japanese cuisine). As she grew up reading anime in a California suburb in the early 1990s, before the Japanese restaurant boom in U.S. urban cities, ...
