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Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / BACKSTREET STORIES
Jan 9, 2011

The narrow roads of Senju

In the frantic yearend season known as shiwasu (lit. "teachers running"), when even dignified people grow harried, a friend invited me to play hooky from the madness and take a ramble together around her Tokyo neighborhood. Since the gift of time together is a great one, I hopped the next train to Senju...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 31, 2010

2010 top movies: Japan feels a crazy little thing called love

This was the year of love in Japan. Not that there was a sudden rise in the marriage rate (ain't happening), but you could sense a certain savviness about love-related issues that wasn't present before.
CULTURE / Books
Dec 19, 2010

Final word on the year's best reading

A tale of love, murder, intrigue, and cultural identity, Mitchell takes the form of the historical novel and worries it like a chew-toy. Yet, rather than destroy the genre, he embellishes it, heaps poetry onto research, gazing with a precise and incisive eye back into the past. This is Nagasaki, the...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Dec 11, 2010

Aging naturally and gracefully

The current Visit Japan campaign, where the government hopes to hit 10 million foreign visitors by the end of 2010, should be courting the American baby boomers — 78 million people between the ages of 50 and 70. We could call it the Visit Aging Japan Campaign.
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Nov 21, 2010

The explosion of life: uprising

First of two parts
COMMUNITY
Nov 20, 2010

A modern-day alchemist melds senses of sight, smell

On the back of Maurice Joosten's business card, a silvered phrase floats across the otherwise blank expanse: "Solve et Coagula" ("Dissolve and Unite"). For Joosten, 48, this ancient dictum of alchemy provides a motto linking his work as an artist, aroma designer and yoga instructor.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 19, 2010

The man who popularized the Edo pleasure district

The Yoshiwara pleasure district of Edo (old Tokyo) has often been immortalized in word and image for the exquisite carnal pleasures it offered.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 19, 2010

Rethinking traditional urushi lacquerware

London, it appears, is a good place to learn about both past and present Japan. Last year, as Britain celebrated 150 years of cultural exchange with Japan, it hosted a number of major shows, including a large-scale matsuri (festival) in Spitalfields Market, a comprehensive exhibition of Utagawa Kuniyoshi...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Oct 29, 2010

'Raiou (The Lightning Tree)'

When Ryuichi Hiroki had a big hit last year with "Yomei 1-kagetsu no Hanayome (April Bride)," a drama about a young woman's struggle with terminal breast cancer, I was glad for him. In a directing career of two decades, he had never enjoyed this sort of commercial success and, unlike the hacks who serve...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Oct 15, 2010

'Cheri (Watashi no Kawaii Hito Cheri)'

"After 40, a woman doesn't need a lover so much as a good PR agent." That would be a great quote for the mythos surrounding Cleopatra, the global metaphor for ageless beauty of the past three millenniums. Besides her hefty cache of personal charms, she knew the value of self-promotion — you can't just...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WORDS TO LIVE BY
Oct 14, 2010

Fashion retailer Choichiro Motoyama

Choichiro Motoyama, 89, is a pioneering Japanese retailer who has brought some of the most famous European fashion brands to the Far East. In the 1960s, he was the first to import Gucci, Hermes, Loewe, Ferragamo, and then later Etro, to Japan. Through constant study and travels, Motoyama developed an...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Oct 1, 2010

'Nanase Futatabi: The Movie (Nanase Again)'

Some genres of Japanese movies are hard to "place" for Westerners, since they have no precise Hollywood equivalent. The ero guro (erotic and grotesque) genre, for example, is often lumped into the horror category by overseas festivals and DVD distributors, but the films are usually less about jack-in-the-box...
Japan Times
LIFE
Sep 12, 2010

Aging through the ages

"If only, when one heard That Old Age was coming One could bolt the door Answer 'not at home' And refuse to meet him!" (Anonymous, "Kokinshu" Imperial poetry anthology, 10th century)
COMMENTARY
Sep 6, 2010

The Australian 'distance'

"Beauty of Distance" is the title of this year's Sydney Biennale of modern arts. The title is obviously an echo and ironic association with the famous book written about Australia titled "Tyranny of Distance," which depicted the dilemma of Australia associating mentally with Europe (England) yet being...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 3, 2010

Contemporary ceramics update the tea ceremony

The Way of Tea has for centuries been a cornerstone of Japanese culture and aesthetic beauty. An old Japanese proverb states: "If a man has no tea in him, he is incapable of understanding truth and beauty."
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / ON: DESIGN
Aug 26, 2010

Objets d'art with a purpose in life

Working across the grain
Japan Times
JAPAN / EXPLAINER
Aug 10, 2010

Makeup Japan-style: Dark to light

Makeup for many women is a vital component of their appearance and one they take great pains to apply, even to the point of dolling themselves up during the crowded morning commute, working through the routine starting with a foundation, then eyebrows, mascara and finally lip gloss.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 23, 2010

'Seraphine'

When a woman values her art over personal happiness, the result can yield sheer, mesmerizing beauty. Tolstoy wrote that women prevail because of their "ingrained talent" to achieve happiness, but at the same time this talent becomes their downfall in achieving true greatness. Indeed, had Frida Kahlo,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jul 9, 2010

Komura Settai finds a new modern audience

It is often difficult to fathom how an artist so popular in his own time slides into oblivion in subsequent generations. 2010 has been a good year for one such artist, Komura Settai (1887-1940), who in his time was a prolific creator, producing illustrations, woodblock prints and stage designs. His recent...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Jul 4, 2010

Amami Oshima: Take a trip to the cloud forest of the imagination

Despite the environmental mistakes of the postwar decades, the violation of a once pristine landscape, a recent trip to Amami Oshima, gave very real cause for hope. Some regions have always, it seems, been in good shape. Flying over the island's green, volcanic hills, I felt as if I were gazing down...
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 12, 2010

Quantitative analysts take on the 'Beautiful Game'

HONG KONG — Sepp Blatter and the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the organizers of the World Cup, had better watch out — the quants have arrived and have put their infamous models to work in predicting the outcome of the World Cup that has just kicked off in South Africa....
CULTURE / Books
Jun 6, 2010

Art rebel without a cause

Pulse waves from the art world of the early 20th Century may have been felt far and wide, but the movements, practitioners and individual works of art themselves were far from being globally coordinate.
CULTURE / Books
May 9, 2010

From a public toilet to outer space, sliding in filth all the way

In his 1989 essay "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast" Tom Wolfe argues: "It was realism that created the 'absorbing' or 'gripping' quality that is peculiar to the novel, the quality that makes the reader feel that he has been pulled not only into the setting of the story but also into the minds and central...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 7, 2010

'Whip It (Roller Girls Diary)'

Having been a star player in Hollywood her entire life, Drew Barrymore views the set from the other side of the camera, in "Whip It" (released in Japan as "Roller Girls Diary") — a wobbly but adorable, whip-smart feature debut. Barrymore, whose own screen presence is always wildly ingratiating, made...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / VIEWS FROM THE STREET
Mar 30, 2010

What's your favorite hanami memory?

COMMUNITY
Feb 27, 2010

Something to be said for Japan's gray zone

It was an a-ha moment, an epiphany light-bolting across her face. It flickered with incredulous certainty and ended with awareness in her eyes.
CULTURE / Books
Feb 21, 2010

Truly unique version of the foreigner's tale

Like a Yemenese bride-to-be who first sees the countenance of her fiance in a photo presented by relatives, Rebecca Otowa experienced a presentiment of her future in a black-and-white image of a building, a 350-year-old farmhouse in rural Japan.
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.'

Longform

Sumadori Bar on Shibuya Ward's main Center Gai street targets young customers who prefer low-alcohol drinks or abstain altogether.
Rethinking that second drink: Japan’s Gen Z gets ‘sober curious’