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Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 9, 2009

Kengo Kuma's Nezu Museum: an urban haven

"This is the maximum number of people that should ever come in here," says Kengo Kuma, glancing toward a small group of people murmuring quietly in front of a nearby Buddha statue. "It's much nicer when it's empty."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 2, 2009

Asian antique sales rocket in New York

NEW YORK — Any trends in the American market for Asian antiques were eclipsed by Asia Week in New York last month when, suddenly, the appetite for Chinese art and antiques could not be sated.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 2, 2009

Shin hanga bringing ukiyo-e back to life

The great print works of ukiyo-e, by the likes of Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Utamaro, became fine art almost by accident. Originally mass produced for the popular market, their status was roughly equivalent to that of illustrated calendars and posters of pop stars today. But, ironically, the fact that they...
Japan Times
JAPAN / EXPLAINER
Sep 29, 2009

Murakami: Titan of postwar literature

Haruki Murakami is probably the most internationally acclaimed and influential contemporary Japanese author alive today. Over a career spanning 30 years, he has illustrated the apathy and ennui enveloping postwar Japan through sometimes wildly fantastic storytelling with surreal twists and turns, sprinkled...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 11, 2009

Hiroshima city tracks down elusive artist

Upon entering his current exhibition at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), it is clear that although what he does can be described as making art, Tsuyoshi Ozawa is not an artist.
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / STYLE WISE
Sep 10, 2009

Time for openings, a night out and second-hand style

THE opening ceremony
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Sep 9, 2009

Fashion company to retail 200 items for ¥990

GOV Retailing Co. announced Tuesday that one-third of its g.u. brand's fall-winter collection, or 200 of the 600 items, will retail for ¥990.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / LIQUID CULTURE
Aug 28, 2009

Crawling back down Center Gai

My Little Pony and Throbbing Gristle make strange bedfellows. No, not in that way. The plastic horse and a poster of the industrial noiseniks both decorate Shirokuma, a funny little bar on Shibuya's Center Gai.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 28, 2009

Bathing in timeless memories

Artist Shinro Ohtake discusses with The Japan Times "inside-out" buildings, private memories, public meanings and other inspirations underlying the "I Love Yu" bathhouse at Naoshima.
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / ON: DESIGN
Aug 27, 2009

Having fun while keeping it tidy and practical

Animated cleaning
CULTURE / TV & Streaming / CHANNEL SURF
Aug 16, 2009

Shoplifting detectives; TOKIO vs. Takako Matsu; Doraemon in love

When evening news shows have time to fill they often run short reports by freelance news teams about pressing social problems. A common theme right now is the rise of shoplifting among senior citizens, a development that has in turn given rise to specialty security guards who patrol department stores...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 14, 2009

Mexico's search for an artistic identity

What kind of art would best represent a rapidly developing country coming out of the social upheaval of a violent revolution — especially when it had, only a century before that, just thrown off the yoke of colonial rule? Twentieth-century Mexico faced just this question — how it attempted to answer...
EDITORIALS
Jun 30, 2009

Taxing way to save pensions

The Diet has enacted the revised National Pension Law, under which more tax money will be used to cover part of the public pension's base tier. The coverage by tax money will be raised from the current 36.5 percent of the base tier to 50 percent. In view of the graying of the population and the low birth...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jun 21, 2009

Secrets to studying Japanese film

In its field I cannot imagine a research guide more needed. For whole decades scholars have struggled simply to locate sources, even to find out what there were. Now, however, the skill and stamina of Mark Nornes and Aaron Gerow have resulted in a reference work that both illuminates and defines this...
Japan Times
LIFE
Jun 14, 2009

Is a national 'Manga Museum' at last set to get off the ground?

When it was announced in April that ¥11.7 billion had been set aside in 2009's supplementary budget to create a new National Center for Media Arts (NCMA) — a museum for manga, anime, video games and technology art — the news was greeted in the same way that most cultural-policy issues are in Japan....
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / STYLE WISE
Jun 11, 2009

Fragrant fashions, high-brow specs, Vogue in 3-D, and Tokyo's own

Getting intimate Tucked in the residential boroughs of Tokyo's Aobadai district in Meguro is a new intimate shop, Lilid 05, where the uplifting scent of fashion wafts you through its unassuming doors. The store opened at the end of April, but the Lilid 05 brand itself is also fairly new, only now in...
CULTURE / Books
May 31, 2009

The good, the bad and the ugly: 12 offbeat visions of Japan

Of the 12 "visions of Japan" gathered in Future Fiction's "Love Hotel City," Steve Finbow's "Shadowings" is among the most interesting. In it he explores the relationship between a character who appears in a comic and the artist who draws that character.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 15, 2009

Gauguin: 'I shall never do anything better'

Was he just a "Sunday painter" who abandoned his wife and five children for a bohemian life in a distant island paradise — where he died of syphilis and poverty in the arms of a teenage mistress?
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / STYLE WISE
May 14, 2009

Say hello to Belgium's best, aptform, the Land of Tomorrow and Forever 21

Bold Belgium "Avant garde" doesn't even begin to describe some of the amazing creations that have come from the Belgian fashion capital of Antwerp over the years. Intelligent designers from the city successfully fuse fantasy with reality, and the "6+ Antwerp" exhibition at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery...
Japan Times
JAPAN
May 5, 2009

Google crosses line with controversial old Tokyo maps

When Google Earth added historical maps of Japan to its online collection last year, the search giant didn't expect a backlash. The finely detailed woodblock prints have been around for centuries, they were already posted on another Web site, and a historical map of Tokyo put up in 2006 hadn't caused...
Japan Times
Events / WHERE IT'S AT
May 5, 2009

'Silent Auction' lends ear to plea of needy

There are many ways to enjoy art: Visit an art museum, join a pottery club or simply walk around a town and take a look at the different architecture.
COMMENTARY
May 4, 2009

Tracking and demobilizing debris in space

SINGAPORE — The 25 radar and optical telescope centers around the world that help the U.S. Armed Forces track debris in space have become increasingly busy in the past couple of years as man-made junk orbiting Earth proliferates, posing a growing danger to both civilian and military use of space. ...
Japan Times
LIFE / JAPAN FASHION WEEK
Apr 12, 2009

Focus on: Yasuko Furuta

For Yasuko Furuta of Japanese womenswear brand Toga, inspiration comes from many different sources but includes an assimilation of complicated elements deconstructing and reconstructing styles to forge a strongly defined but harmonized collection.
CULTURE / Books
Apr 12, 2009

Dark thoughts and macabre tales

As a boy, Edogawa Rampo was, as he relates in one of the essays included in this collection, a devotee of popular fiction. Entering the fantastic twists and turns of his stories we are soon lost in them just as, when boys and girls ourselves, we became the characters in the romances and adventures we...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Mar 29, 2009

Hold the SOS call on the Japanese language

Will the Japanese language die, crushed by the onslaught of English? This question has set off some heated talk in Japan recently because of a book suggesting that it may. First, a friend of mine in Tokyo, a member of a small reading club, told me about it. Then another friend wrote to say the book became...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Mar 29, 2009

Uncovering an ukiyo-e master in Obuse

The small town of Obuse nestles quietly in the foothills of the Japan Alps, a 30-minute ride on a local rail line from the prefectural capital of Nagano City.

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