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Japan Times
CULTURE / Film / SHORT TAKES
Jun 8, 2007

Campaign

Director: Kazuhiro Soda Language: Japanese with English subtitles in Tokyo
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle / ON THE BOOK TRAIL
Jun 5, 2007

"The Great American Mousical," "Jake Cake: The Robot Dinner Lady"

"The Great American Mousical," Julie Andrews Edwards, Puffin Books; 2006; 133 pp. If you don't know who Julie Andrews is, ask your parents. They'll tell you how Andrews, the star actress of movie classics like "Mary Poppins" and "The Sound of Music," brought cinema alive for children all over the world....
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...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 11, 2007

'Ashita no Watashi no Tsukurikata'

Film genres are more or less universal. Even the Western, that quintessential American genre, has inspired filmmakers everywhere, from Italy to Japan, to make local versions. But some genres thrive particularly well in certain cultures, for reasons not always clear to outsiders. Why, for example, the...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
May 10, 2007

Looking at the garish and the free

Let's face it, there really is nothing like the face. Lovers dream of faces, poets stretch and struggle to juggle the words so that they might capture and communicate a countenance. Even businesspeople, the ultimate pragmatists, will travel across towns or oceans — when a telephone or e-mail could...
BASEBALL / BASEBALL BULLET-IN
May 6, 2007

Skipper Oya deserves credit for BayStars' surge

Japan pro baseball's hottest team through the middle of Golden Week was the Yokohama BayStars, riding a five-game winning streak and standing in first place, albeit by percentage points, in the Central League pennant race.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 4, 2007

'Tsotsi'

A while back in these pages, I was dumping on a movie ("The Last King Of Scotland") for giving us the same-old white man's view of Africa. What we really needed, I wrote, was an African view of Africa, something like an African "City of God," which gave an insider's look at life and crime in Rio's favelas....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Apr 20, 2007

'2:37'

A moment of stillness -- that's what "2:37" chooses for its opening shot, the camera pointed skyward, a canopy of green leaves framed against the gray sky beyond. It doesn't last long. Soon the camera moves earthward, and we enter an Australian high school where the calm is soon shattered when a student...
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Apr 6, 2007

Film festival marks genocide

Seven films, six of them unreleased in Japan and all of them shot in Rwanda, will be screened as part of the Memories of Rwanda Film Festival, taking place April 7-20 at Uplink Factory in Shibuya, Tokyo. The festival's program aims to inform viewers about how the 100-day-long genocide, which took the...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 30, 2007

'Une aventure'

When reviewing a movie, critics tend to trawl through the elements that made it work, things like clever plotting, intense performances, lavish set design and the like. But we often seem to overlook one of the most essential elements of cinema: sex appeal.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Mar 27, 2007

Midtown -- Roppongi just got loftier

Move over, glitzy Roppongi Hills. There's a new kid on the block in Tokyo's Minato Ward -- an even taller landmark testament to the spoils of wealth.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 16, 2007

'Va, vis et deviens'

On the surface, "Va, vis et deviens" is a political story, drawing from a little-known chunk of history called "Operation Moses." In 1984, 80,000 Ethiopian Jews (known as "Falasha") were airlifted from their native land to Israel in an effort to save them from drought and famine. That incident is a starting...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 2, 2007

'Paris, je t'aime'

It's a collage of miniatures, a collection of gemlike vignettes. In "Paris, je t'aime," 21 directors of various nationalities create 18 bite-size shorts (the longest being five minutes) about Paris, each one named after a Parisian neighborhood. Like a plate of hors d'oeuvres from a five-star restaurant...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 2, 2007

'The Last King of Scotland'

If you're thinking that "The Last King Of Scotland" is some kind of fantasy-sequel to "Braveheart," well, guess again. The "king" of the film's title is 1970s Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada, who was a former barracks boy with the King's Highlanders, and liked to boast that his defiance of Uganda's British...
CULTURE / Books
Feb 25, 2007

Upstairs, downstairs and inside old Japan

Companions of the Holiday by Donald Richie, with an introduction by Timothy Harris and an afterword by the author. Tokyo/New York: Printed Matter Press, 181 pp., $15 (paper) Donald Richie is known to readers of The Japan Times for his regular reviews of books dealing with Asia, and more particularly...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Feb 22, 2007

Beirut dramatist seeks new strategy

Lebanese dramatist Rabih Mroue returns to Tokyo International Arts Festival this year with the world premiere of his new play, "How Nancy Wished that Everything was an April Fool's Joke," three years after making his TIF debut. It is a work that reflects the fluid situation of Lebanese society after...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 9, 2007

'My Super Ex-Girlfriend'

People tend to talk about "chick flicks" a lot, you know, the kind of film that stars Anne Hathaway or Holly Hunter and has people stressing a lot about their relationships. There's an assumption that certain sort of films will only play to female audiences, but you never hear about the flip side of...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Feb 3, 2007

Love Stories: the five rules

All is fair in love and war, but still there are rules. At least -- according to a romance-reading colleague -- there are rules in love stories.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 1, 2007

Tokyo's dark side

Welshman John Williams first came to Japan in 1988, intending to stay two years, write a script and return to Britain to make a movie. He ended up making eight shorts, a documentary and finally a feature film -- the drama "Firefly Dreams" -- all in Japan and with Japanese casts and crews. Released in...
CULTURE / Books
Jan 18, 2007

An unflinching account of a cinema legend

Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies With Akira Kurosawa, by Teruyo Nogami. Stone Bridge Press: Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006, 296pp, $25 (cloth) Great directors, once dead, inevitably attract biographers, memoirists and critics in large numbers who chronicle and critique every aspect...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 12, 2007

'Brothers of the Head'

There's a scene near the end of the punk-rock documentary "D.O.A." where The Sex Pistols are playing a country and western ballroom in San Antonio, near the end of their ill-fated 1978 tour. The band hold the stage penned in by a baying mob, barely able to make it through their songs as the crowd pelts...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jan 12, 2007

A collection of the semifamous

Purposely or not, bands tend to create personas along with their music. The persona is usually based on that of the lead singer or otherwise most conspicuous member, and musicians who find that their needs for self-expression don't jibe with their group's persona either quit for solo careers or set up...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Dec 16, 2006

Focusing on the elusive imagery of identity

Why would a young photographer from Venezuela studying in Japan choose to spend valuable time recording the lives of Japanese-Brazilians in Brazil?
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Dec 12, 2006

Students spread their wings

Ever since Japan opened its doors to the West, English has been zealously studied in Japan's high schools, night schools, universities and companies.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WORDS TO LIVE BY
Nov 28, 2006

Keiko Hisano

Keiko Hisano, 25, is a production controller for Nakabo Japan Co. Ltd., an Osaka-based knitwear manufacturer that produces clothing for many famous brands. Hoping to eventually become a designer, she is happy now just to be at the base of the design pyramid, whether running up and down Omotesando with...
JAPAN
Nov 26, 2006

Award-winning documentary film on Megumi Yokota debuts in Japan

and his wife, Sakie, look at messages posted Saturday in a theater in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, by viewers of a Canadian documentary about their daughter, Megumi, who was abducted by North Korea in 1977. KYODO PHOTO
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Nov 17, 2006

FILMeX shows size doesn't matter

Tokyo FILMeX enters its seventh year as the smaller, friendlier, artier alternative to the Tokyo International Film Festival.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Oct 1, 2006

Hisashi Inoue: Crusader with a pen

So wide-ranging are 71-year-old Hisashi Inoue's talents and activities that it is difficult to know which to focus on at the expense of others.

Longform

In 2020, 38% of all households were single-person. That figure is projected to rise to 44.3% by 2050.
The rise of AI companionship in a lonely Japan