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Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Mar 11, 2011

The Centre Pompidou brings the surreal to Tokyo

In its passage from the art world into everyday speech, the word "surreal" has ended up as mere shorthand for the bizarre and the unusual. But it originally referred to something deeper.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 25, 2011

Asian art challenges Western museums' way of thinking

Art from Asia has enjoyed increased global interest in the past few decades, which has brought major changes to the way in which the art scene now views this hitherto neglected region. In a special symposium, "How is the World Engaging with Contemporary Asian Art?," at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo on...
CULTURE / Books
Jan 16, 2011

Mirrors are nothing but eyes

FOREST OF EYES: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Jeffrey Angles. University of California Press, 2010, 164 pp., $19.95 (paper) These are the lines from which the title of this poetry collection comes:
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jan 15, 2011

Authentic slice of Japan preserved in South Florida

The first two weeks of the new year are over, and Tom Gregersen, 61, is putting away the kine and usu, the traditional wooden mallets and mortars used in the mochitsuki (rice-cake pounding) event held as part of the O-shogatsu Festival at The Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 14, 2011

Spelling out China's calligraphic influence

At the end of the Edo Period (1603-1868), as Japan began to change its long-held cultural reference point from China to the West, a strong Sinophile interest was maintained by the nation's cultural and political elites. From the late 19th century, however, the cultural reorientation to the West had deleterious...
CULTURE / Books
Oct 10, 2010

Of villains and poets

Divided into five sections, the American poet and translator Taylor Mignon's first solo collection of poetry begins with his "Juvenilia."
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / ON: DESIGN
Sep 30, 2010

Design that all adds up

Summing up stylish bookends
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 17, 2010

Show undermined by a surfeit of masters

Save us from the well-rounded exhibition! For museum visitors in Japan, this is a constant danger; something I was reminded of again by the Setagaya Art Museum's latest show: "Masterpieces from the Collection of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur." Like other multi-faceted exhibitions that endeavor to provide...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jul 9, 2010

A view of Naples' 'head of the hill'

Following the exhibition "Galleria Borghese" at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum earlier this year, yet another famous Italian artistic institution is in town. This time it's the Capodimonte Museum from Naples, with a show at the National Museum of Western Art. Like the Borghese show, this exhibition...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jul 2, 2010

Vernacular photography — a means to avoid an end

A woman in a corseted, white-lace dress stares straight ahead as she unveils a framed funerary portrait of another young woman. This sepia-toned 19th-century photograph is historian and curator Geoffrey Batchen's choice for the very first image of "Suspending Time: Life - Photography - Death" at the...
Japan Times
BASKETBALL / HOOP SCOOP
Jun 12, 2010

Okada top Japanese in bj-league

First in a two-part series
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 19, 2010

Motherly love, both romantic and vulgar

A naked mother radiates maternal happiness as she beams at the camera with her peachy-skinned wide-eyed baby clasped to her chest. Nearby, piercing blue eyes and oddly elongated ears frame a face attached to a wooden body with women's breasts and a solitary truncated hand hovering by its side.
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / Japan Pulse
Feb 16, 2010

Cell-phone magazine comes out of the closet

Playing to lovers of Tokyo Girls Collection, Model Closet launches a mobile cell-phone magazine promising to provide 'non fiction, real trend.'
CULTURE / Books
Jan 31, 2010

Fitting farewells for the poet James Kirkup

The coincidence between the titles of these two volumes is accidental, but nonetheless fortuitous, for together they serve to memorialize the English poet James Kirkup (1918-2009), who died on May 10 last year.
CULTURE / Books
Jan 24, 2010

Become a slave to rhythm

In the introduction to the first English translation of her work, Takako Arai refers to poems as vacant lots, alluding to the economic suffering of her hometown Kiryu, Gunma Prefecture, and to the open spaces left by terrorism and bombs in New York City and Belgrade.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 18, 2009

The beauty of subtle deceit

More than in any other country where the lacquer tree grows, the art of working with its hard-drying sap has excelled here in Japan. Two leading exponents were Ogawa Haritsu (1663-1747) and Shibata Zeshin (1807-1891), who both stand out not only for their inventive sense of design in decorating three-dimensional...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Dec 5, 2009

Event wraps up 'Italy in Japan 2009'

An event featuring a fashion show of Ferragamo's latest collection was held in Tokyo Thursday to wrap up the "Italy in Japan 2009" program.
COMMUNITY
Dec 5, 2009

Event wraps up 'Italy in Japan 2009'

An event featuring a fashion show of Ferragamo's latest collection was held in Tokyo Thursday to wrap up the "Italy in Japan 2009" program.
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / STYLE WISE
Nov 12, 2009

Discount Comme de Garcons, thermo threads, extreme styles and bohemian flair

Back to black
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / STYLE WISE
Oct 8, 2009

Fashion rethinks, rebrands and reasserts itself in the recession

Uniqlo gets an A+ for +J There may be a recession, but that doesn't mean that we can't afford style, thanks to the new maestro of cool, Mr. Tadashi Yanai.
CULTURE / Books
Sep 27, 2009

The ink-stained road: impressions of Japan

JAPAN THROUGH WRITER'S EYES, edited by Elizabeth Ingrams. Eland, 2009, 336 pp., $29.95 (paper) Reviewed by Stephen Mansfield Recent years have seen a number of excellent anthologies of writings on Japan, including "Japan: True Stories of Life on the Road" and the superb "Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese...
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / ON: DESIGN
Jul 30, 2009

Summertime designs run hot and cool

Recovered crests
JAPAN / History / JAPAN TIMES GONE BY
Jun 21, 2009

JAPAN TIMES GONE BY

100 YEARS AGO
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / ON: DESIGN
May 28, 2009

Design innovations that come naturally

A cool dry
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 22, 2009

'L'heure d'ete'

Moliere once wrote that the wonder of a French vacance lay in its "deep, profound dullness, those hours and hours of time, marked only by meals and interminable glasses of wine." A similar kind of wonder propels the intimate, endearingly smug "L'heure d'ete" (international title: "Summer Hours") —...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 15, 2009

A new spirit for tea traditions

In the rarefied world of Japanese tea ceremony, innovations have often been greeted coolly. When the Japanese-American abstract sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-88) gave a tea kettle of his own making to the landscape designer and tea connoisseur Mirei Shigemori (1896-75), the recipient was baffled.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 8, 2009

Issey Miyake's "U-Tsu-Wa" filled with character and inspiration

In Japanese, the word utsuwa literally means "vessel" or "container," but it can also be used to describe a person's character. Someone said to have a "large utsuwa" ("utsuwa ga ookii") is a person of high caliber or someone with tremendous capacity or generosity. When celebrated Japanese fashion designer...

Longform

Figure skater Akiko Suzuki was once told her ideal weight should be 47 kilograms, a number she now admits she “naively believed.” This led to her have a relationship with food that resulted in her suffering from anorexia.
The silent battle Japanese athletes fight with weight