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Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 24, 2017

Motonobu: The father of Kano styles

A family-run enterprise, the Kano school of painting was a consistent force in Japan's art world for more than 300 years, from the Muromachi Period (1336-1573) up until its fortune waned in the 19th century.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / BLACK EYE
Sep 17, 2017

Japanese professor studies U.S. 'birth of a nation' and finds common humanity

Understanding racial issues is key to knowing America's history and, through that, modern Japan's, says Keiko Shirakawa.
CULTURE / Books
May 27, 2017

'Record of a Night Too Brief': Hiromi Kawakami uncoils life's mysteries with an exploration of dreams

When I met the popular author Hiromi Kawakami in London recently, I asked her thoughts about the great authors of Japan's literary past. Did she, for example, enjoy the novels of Meiji Era (1868-1912) great Natsume Soseki?
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Apr 11, 2017

Kakiemon: Generations of beauty

There's still time to enjoy cherry blossoms. Through May 14, the Toguri Museum of Art in Tokyo is exhibiting a stunning new work by Sakaida Kakiemon XV, the current inheritor of one of the most famous names in Japanese porcelain. The very large lidded jar, commissioned by the museum to commemorate its...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Mar 14, 2017

Masaaki Yamada: A painter of all stripes and colors

Masaaki Yamada (1929-2010) is like a mystery man of modernism. He apparently had no specialist art training of note and is known only by a skeleton biography that is mostly blank before 1943, and patchy thereafter. Said to have begun painting from the so-called tabula rasa of bombed out World War II...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 20, 2016

Raku: A traditional contemporary art form

At the opening of "The Cosmos in a Tea Bowl: Transmitting a Secret Art Across Generations of the Raku Family" at The National Museum of Modern Art, in Kyoto, the current head of the Raku family, Kichizaemon XV (b. 1949), explained that the event would be "an unprecedented and once-in-a-lifetime exhibition...
JAPAN / JAPANESE IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
Dec 19, 2016

Comments from workers of international organizations

According to statistics of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, more than 800 Japanese are working for international organizations. Such professionals include those doing clerical work at the organizations’ Japanese units, appointed to lead an organization by using expertise gained through their careers...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 13, 2016

Young artists to keep your eye on

In Kurt Vonnegut's 1982 novel "Deadeye Dick," a Japanese man walks into an all-night drugstore and gestures for the protagonist, Rudy Waltz, to follow him outdoors. There they gaze at the decapitated cupola of Rudy's childhood home, glistening white in the moonlight. It reminds the homesick man of Mount...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 8, 2016

Reality and imagination: a double brush

One take on the past two centuries of artistic development is as a cacophonous cache of "isms." With latter-day Japanese museum curation, impressionism regularly glistens as the golden-haired, oft-cited draw among recurrent "ism"-titled exhibitions — historical precedents, collection-building imperatives,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 8, 2016

The Setagaya Art Museum's 30th Anniversary Exhibition: Five Stories from the Collection

Nov. 19-Jan. 29
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Oct 6, 2016

Festival/Tokyo speaks with a defiant voice

Press conferences are usually upbeat affairs, but at the one held to herald Festival/Tokyo — a two-month theater festival that kicks off Oct. 15 — Artistic Director Sachio Ichimura appears looking worried and begins proceedings by bemoaning the event's financial situation and wondering aloud about...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 6, 2016

'Craft Arts: Innovation of "Tradition and Avant-Garde," and the Present Day'

Sept. 17-Dec. 4
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jun 7, 2016

Japan's conflicted art of World War II

The Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art's current exhibition, "1945±5: The Works that Survived through the Turbulent and Reconstruction Era," showcases modern Japanese art five years either side of the pivotal end of World War II. It addresses oil painting and mostly follows a conventional tale of Japan...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 17, 2016

Caravaggio: Art that has been through the wars

"In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
Japan Times
BUSINESS
May 12, 2016

Collector Maezawa drops $98 million on art in two days

Yusaku Maezawa, the 40-year-old founder of online clothing retailer Zozotown, continued his art shopping spree on Wednesday, helping Sotheby's reach $242.2 million in sales at its contemporary art auction even as the art market continues to contract. Maezawa said he is building a private museum outside...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Mar 15, 2016

Robert Morris and Kishio Suga's piece in conversation

There are just two installations in the exhibition "Robert Morris and Kishio Suga" at Blum & Poe's fifth-floor gallery in Harajuku: Morris' "Lead and Felt" and Suga's "Parameters of Space." However, there are a number of correspondences between these two artists that make their pairing engrossing and...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 19, 2016

The frayed edges of modern Japan

In the Edo Period (1603-1868) and the years that followed, Japan made strenuous efforts to bring together its patchwork of feudal regions into a strongly centralized state with a unified culture. Accordingly, the nation now is one of the most homogenous in the world. But there are a couple of places...
EDITORIALS
Dec 25, 2015

Budgeting ahead of an election

The Abe administration appears to be sacrificing budgetary discipline in favor of doling out pork ahead of the Upper House election.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 17, 2015

The ripple effect of Tawaraya Sotatsu's waves

'The most important Japanese artist you've never heard of." That is how James Ulak, senior curator of Japanese art at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, describes Tawaraya Sotatsu, the focus of the gallery's current magnificent exhibition. The show presents the first in-depth examination of...
Japan Times
ASIA PACIFIC
Nov 16, 2015

Philippines' Aquino pushes infrastructure projects as term in office ends

With seven months left in office, Philippine President Benigno Aquino III is taking measures to strengthen his infrastructure legacy and boost the resilience of one of Asia's fastest-growing economies.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Entertainment news
Nov 10, 2015

Chinese buyer nabs Modigliani nude for $170 million — second-highest price ever paid at art auction

A Modigliani nude painting was sold to an unnamed Chinese buyer at Christie's on Monday for $170.4 million, the second-highest price ever for a work of art at auction, as deep-pocketed collectors continue to pay, and pay big, for some rare masterpieces up for sale in this year's autumn auctions season....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 3, 2015

Deutsche Bank sets the right standard

There is an image in the Deutsche Bank Collection exhibition at the Hara Museum that, at first sight, seems slightly out of place. It is a street scene in New York that glows in the warm light of a sunset. Office workers can be seen going home, a man window-shops outside a camera store, even the inclusion...
BUSINESS / NOTEBOOK
Sep 15, 2015

Invitation to free English kogei tour at Mitsukoshi

Free gallery tours in English will be held at the Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi Main Store to provide non-Japanese with the opportunity to learn about Japanese kogei traditional crafts on Sept. 19 and 20, starting at 1:30 p.m. and 3 p.m.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 23, 2015

Germany should buy — and show — Hitler's art

The German government should exhibit Adolf Hitler's artwork publically to help people better undersand what happened to Germany in the 1930s and '40s.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Apr 12, 2015

Pianist Etsko Tazaki seeks out the legacies of Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert

Whether their lives were long or short, the classic composers tended to cement their legacies in their final days, perhaps the point in their lives when they were at their most philosophical.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 19, 2015

Neo-impressionism: color-coded familiarities

The term "neo-impressionism" suggests a sequel to impressionism and, just like with movie sequels, there is a faint lowering of expectations. But this is entirely the wrong way to approach "Neo-Impressionism: from Light to Color" at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Feb 11, 2015

No-frills dramatist casts Japan in a different light

The title of Yudai Kamisato's new work "+51 Aviacíon, San Borja" references his grandmother's address in Lima and the international telephone dialling code of Peru — but that only hints at the unusually cosmopolitan background of this 32-year-old Japanese playwright and director who also has relatives...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 15, 2015

Whistler: The misunderstood artistic rebel

Though his paintings may not look radical to us today, in his time, James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) often faced incomprehension — both through interpretations of his art and his own uncompromising stance toward it. Museumgoers in Japan now have a rare opportunity to decide for themselves the merits...

Longform

Tetsuzo Shiraishi, speaking at The Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage, uses a thermos to explain how he experienced the U.S. firebombing of March 1945, when he was just 7 years old.
From ashes to high-rises: A survivor’s account of Tokyo’s postwar past