The temporary housing built for the survivors of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami is usually depicted as being dark and cold, inhabited by sad people. But according to the NHK ...
The Saitama Gold Theater Company, supervised by Japan’s most famous theater director, Yukio Ninagawa, is made up of seniors — average age 75 — who were stage amateurs before they ...
If you like sumo but think the two-week basho schedule is too much, then check out “Nihon Ozumo Tournament Dai-Sanjukyu-kai Taikai” (“39th Japan Grand Sumo Tournament”; Fuji TV, Sun., 4:05 ...
The FIFA World Cup is about to start, and the Japan national team will face the three teams in its ...
Japanese TV is fascinated with the lives of people who were famous in their youth, as shown on “Tama no ...
Teacher-cum-TV personality Osamu Hayashi has made Toshin, where he works, the most famous juku (cram school) in Japan. One Toshin colleague who has ridden on his coattails is history instructor Shinichiro Kanetani, the host of the new series “Shinkaishaku Nihonshi” (“New Interpretation of Japanese ...
The “You” in the title of the variety show “You wa nani shi Nihon e?” (What Are You Doing in Japan?; TV Tokyo, Mon, 6:57 p.m.) is fluid, since it can be used as both a second person and a third person pronoun. In ...
Osamu Hayashi is the most famous juku (cram school) teacher in Japan thanks to his frequent TV appearances and trademark phrase “Ima desho” (“Why not now?”). His main claim to fame as a teacher, however, is his ability to retain huge amounts of information. ...
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, a conflagration whose causes most people probably don’t understand. This week, NHK will present a series of German documentaries, “Doomsday World War I,” on its BS1 channel that attempt to explain ...
In baseball parlance, a “Roosevelt game” is one where a team wins by one run. The new TBS drama series, “Roosevelt Game” (Sunday, 9 p.m.), is based on a novel by Jun Ikeido, who wrote last year’s smash series “Hanzawa Naoki.” This one is ...
Former news anchor Christel Takigawa gets to sample some of that famous Japanese omotenashi (hospitality) she promoted during the bid process for the 2020 Summer Olympics. She is this week’s guest on NHK’s travel show “Tsurube no Kazoku ni Kampai” (“Tsurube Toasts Families”; NHK-G, ...
Japanese detective shows dwell on procedure and deduction, but the new Fuji TV series, “Bitter Blood” (Tues., 9 p.m.), adds an action component: If the preview trailers are any indication, Japanese police detectives get into a lot more fights than previously thought. Some are ...
The new Fuji TV series, “Black President” (Tues., 10 p.m.), is not about Barack Obama. It’s about a man named Mitamura (Ikki Sawamura), an entrepreneur who has turned his apparel company into a national success, mainly by oppressing his workers, which is why his ...
L.M. Montgomery’s “Anne of Green Gables” is the most popular young-adult novel in Japan, at least among girls. The original was published in Canada in 1908, and was translated into Japanese by Hanako Muraoka. NHK’s new morning drama, “Hanako and Anne” (NHK-G, M-F, 8 ...
TV Tokyo remakes one of the most famous TV dramas of the ’90s, “Keiji” (“Detective”; Wed., 9 p.m.), which originally ran on NHK and starred Ken Takakura. This new version has Katsunori Takahashi in the titular role of Minoru Akiniwa, who works for the ...
Each of the major networks have at least one “big family” they follow in fly-on-the-wall fashion over a period of years to yield two specials per annum. With their reality-show veneer of the joys and sorrows of raising a lot of kids, these shows ...
This week marks the third anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake. On a practical level, TBS’s two-hour special, “Shinsai chokugo: Seishi wo wakeru 72-jikan ni subeki koto” (“Right After the Disaster: 72 Hours Means the Difference Between Life and Death”; Mon., 9 p.m.), ...
