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Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 11, 2008

Annette Messager: one humble messenger

Around the 1960s, French artist Annette Messager began to move away from the idea of "great art." Using materials readily available around the house, her works acquired an air of familiarity and allowed her to use these often effeminated — and thus undervalued — materials to make social critiques....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 14, 2008

Traditional delights

In a summertime exhibition to celebrate the 120th anniversary of Kokka, the authoritative Japanese journal on pre-modern Asian art, and the 130th anniversary of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, the (TNM) has taken an interesting change of direction in its curation.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jul 3, 2008

Boston museum's ukiyo-e celebrates Japanese merchants' taste

Until recent years, ukiyo-e were regarded as somewhat declasse by Japanese art connoisseurs — and they are still sniffed at by many whose taste is informed by Zen and the tea-ceremony. But these colorful paintings and prints of what was then a truly exotic world did catch the eyes of foreigners who...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jun 26, 2008

How Carlo Zauli changed the course of contemporary Japanese ceramics

Change can be one of the most difficult words for traditional craftsmen to hear.
Japan Times
LIFE
Jun 22, 2008

Grounded rulers of the sky

His sharp, calm gaze follows yet another aircraft swooping down from the cloudless sky, its tires screeching in clouds of blue smoke as it returns to Earth on Haneda's concrete runway. One more flight successfully completed, he thinks — and now the next.
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
May 18, 2008

Japan affords translators an elevated status not found elsewhere

Here's a little quiz for you.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Apr 3, 2008

Seeking international artists

W hen New York's Armory Show art fair started out back in 1994, it was a simple affair. At a news conference last week in the city, one of the four founders, Paul Morris, described how works shown the first year were hung on the walls or laid out on the beds of the small Gramercy Hotel.
BUSINESS
Mar 31, 2008

Group plans to bury Tokyo's elevated 'shuto'

A group of business executives is floating the idea of burying all of Tokyo's elevated highways 60 meters underground. The megaproject also includes a sweeping greening of the space they will leave behind and large-scale redevelopment at key highway ramps.
CULTURE / Art
Jan 31, 2008

New Shirokane art complex

New Shirokane art complex 3-1-15 Shirokane, Minato-ku, Tokyo
CULTURE / Art
Jan 17, 2008

"Kazuharu Ishikawa: Dear friends"

Yukari Art Contemporary
Japan Times
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Jan 9, 2008

Can we be forever young?

Jeanette Winterson's latest novel, "The Stone Gods," is set in the future on a distant planet whose resources have been over- exploited by colonizing humans.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 20, 2007

Human conditions

Like Picasso at his most mythologically cubist or a dark dream from the subconscious, the Dairakudakan butoh dance troupe took its audience back to the primordial for its 35th anniversary performances last week — and then brought it right back to the present.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 6, 2007

Picking up where science slips

When it comes to giving us a handle on the world we live in, science no longer cuts it. In its latest incarnations — superstring and M-theory — it postulates 10, 11 or even more dimensions, only three or four of which we can perceive. Science's explanation of matter is equally unsatisfying. Since...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Nov 29, 2007

A passion for the classics

Mention "Die Soldaten," B.A. Zimmermann's dark, uncompromising and harrowing work of 1960s modernism, and Hiroshi Wakasugi visibly brightens. It's the first season for this highly respected conductor as artistic director of Tokyo's New National Theater, and he's clearly very, very pleased that he has...
LIFE / Language
Nov 27, 2007

New translation vividly depicts postwar Tokyo

Shishi Bunroku (the pen name of Iwata Toyoo) is a writer who deserves to be better known. His novel "Jiyu Gakko (School of Freedom)" was a best seller when it first appeared in 1951, and gives as vivid a picture as we're likely to get today of what daily life was like in postwar Tokyo.
COMMENTARY / World / SENTAKU MAGAZINE
Nov 13, 2007

Murakami's Nobel leanings

The news that 88-year-old Doris Lessing received the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature was not greeted by the Japanese media with as much fanfare as former U.S. Vice President Al Gore's winning the Nobel Peace Prize. This perhaps was because Japanese literary circles were more interested in whether Haruki...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 25, 2007

A feel for beauty

English potter-artist-writer Bernard Leach (1887-1979) was lucky to have lived in Japan — during his early childhood and on later occasions — when, even though change was coming rapidly, many centuries-old traditions continued unaltered.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 27, 2007

Ikuo Hirayama sought solace on the road

Ikuo Hirayama clearly represents how the Japanese like to see — and project — themselves.
Japan Times
LIFE / Language
Sep 23, 2007

Cellphone bards hit bestseller lists

Like many other young Japanese, Rin, 21, punches her mobile phone keys very quickly. Holding her phone with two hands, and moving her thumbs deftly and smoothly, she quickly generates sentences on the small screen.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 23, 2007

Late to the art party in the 1980s

"Place" and "presence" were two of the core concerns of Minimalism, the last thread of Modernism before it collapsed into Postmodernism's stylistic confusion in the 1970s.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 16, 2007

Obsessed with the super-real

Regardless of one's own relationship to religion, many of us are disposed to believe we can transcend the present world, rising above it to another super-reality, to a surreal world.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jul 12, 2007

Japan's saucy chameleon of Modernism

Japanese modernist art is often described as being derivative of its Western counterpart, but beneath the surface a real difference between them can be likened to that between religion in Japan and the West.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jun 22, 2007

Four Stories rises in Osaka's 'cultural desert'

OSAKA — For the Kansai region's foreign residents, a night out in Osaka has not usually meant a literary experience. Unlike neighboring Kyoto, with its reputation as a mecca for foreign artists, writers and poets, one did not usually walk into an Osaka bar or restaurant expecting to hear quality short...
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
Jun 17, 2007

Japan's master of an ancient Muslim art

For Kouichi Honda, writing a beautiful line is what life is about. Getting every detail right — the subtle curves, the varying thicknesses and the density of the ink — matters to him as much as life itself.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jun 14, 2007

More international by the year

The title of the 52nd Venice Biennale, "Think with the senses, feel with the mind," has an almost paradoxical twist. But in the context of the international art scene it is a strong statement — some would even call it controversial.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jun 7, 2007

One man's porn is . . .

Sexuality is polymorphous. It has to be. This is because — rightly or wrongly — it often faces rigid repressive structures that it can only outflank by changing its forms and pouring its energy in new directions.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 1, 2007

'Sketches of Frank Gehry'

In "Sketches of Frank Gehry," director Sydney Pollack films buildings with the same sensuality he brings to on-screen lovers — tracing the surfaces and contours as if they were cheekbones or eyelids, noting the way walls interlock like arms in ecstatic embrace. During his 40-year career, the creator...

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