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COMMUNITY
Nov 13, 2010

Dream becomes reality for Scottish manga creator

It sits in a place of beauty, incongruously bordered between Japanese stone art and a vivid blue ink painting: "2000 A.D.," a classic British comic book from the 1980s. The apocalypse orange cover shrieks "Revenge of the Warlock" but — muted by a plastic overlay to protect its condition — the sci-fi...
CULTURE / Film
Nov 12, 2010

'Spring Fever'

Director Lou Ye continues to prove he's one of the more daring directors working in China today with his latest, "Spring Fever." Or perhaps I should say, one of the more daring directors not working in China today, for Lou was placed on the government censors' blacklist in 2006 after his last film, "Summer...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Nov 7, 2010

A Kyushu tale of two cities in one

Fukuoka, the biggest city in Kyushu and a key gateway linking Japan to the rest of Asia, has the air of a modern metropolis. But the city is also rich in traditional culture and its residents' long-standing hospitality toward visitors is well known.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Oct 31, 2010

Okinawan garden majesty

The world's first gardens may well have been made of coral, natural clusters of underwater beauty that could be glimpsed through the transparent water. Perfectly tone-coordinated, balanced and formed, they were refined by nature to a degree that may have suggested the divine.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Oct 29, 2010

Playing it for laughs the understated way

It is 3 p.m. in a quiet, residential neighborhood in Tokyo. A lady in a red dress stands by the side of a narrow street in front of a house, her hair held back and her face shielded from the sun by a woman holding a parasol.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 15, 2010

Breaking old conventions to find the new

Ryota Aoki (b.1978) says that he wants to see things that never before existed in ceramics. Personally, too, he is the exemplification of that ethos. We do not usually expect a celebrated ceramicist to be wearing a turban, have both ears pierced and be listening to hip-hop in the background as he sits...
LIFE / Digital / TECH_JAPAN
Oct 13, 2010

Takara Tomy's Love Digi continues evolution of purikura

Most readers in Japan will be familiar with the local phenomenon of purikura. Translated as "print club," they are small, user-decorated photographs with sticker backings. These personalized stickers are quite popular among young girls in Japan, who will often plaster them all over notebooks and mobile...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 1, 2010

Find time in the 'Forests of Asoka'

Like many people, I have an instinctive suspicion of conceptual art, regarding its practitioners in the same league as politicians, lawyers and snake oil salesmen; namely, hot-air artists who rely too much on words to win us over to their dubious concepts. Art should effortlessly speak for itself, but...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Sep 21, 2010

Battling a broken system

First in a two-part series In July, Tokyo's family court granted me, an American, physical custody (kangoken) of my 13-year-old daughter exactly 120 days after she was abducted by my Japanese wife, a lifelong public servant employed as a teacher at a state school in Tokyo. This just may be the first...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 17, 2010

Firth on playing it gay by playing it straight

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Colin Firth was nominated for an Oscar for best actor this year for "A Single Man." As we know, Hollywood insider Jeff Bridges took home the Oscar, but Firth was "genuinely thrilled at the nomination and genuinely relieved when it was over. The stress is something else. So are...
SOCCER / PREMIER REPORT
Sep 11, 2010

Rooney's antics overshadow England's strong start

LONDON — Another mad, mad week on Planet Football.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 3, 2010

'Trouble in Hollywood (What Just Happened?)'

Hollywood is such a duplicitous, back-stabbing, narcissistic pit of weasels and vipers that making a satire about it should be no more difficult than, say, getting a gram of cocaine delivered to a 90210 address at four in the morning. And yet the conundrum is this: If you really tell it like it is, you...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 27, 2010

Perceptions of space, from Japan to the world

"I'm a kind of iguana. But I'm the kind of iguana that travels."
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Aug 21, 2010

Voice of the times bridges cultures for seven decades

Most of us would probably be happy to have a handful of memories to reminisce over in our later years, episodes from our youth we could run past our friends while hoping their eyes don't glaze over. Ichiro Urushibara, a British citizen who has spent 69 years in Japan, has enough memories and amusing...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Aug 1, 2010

Lee Ufan: Korean at the forefront of Japan's modern art

For the last several years, Benesse Art Site on the island of Naoshima in the Seto Inland Sea has featured prominently in rankings of Japan's best tourist destinations.
Japan Times
LIFE
Jul 25, 2010

A northern odyssey

Komandorskiye Ostrova — the Commander Islands in English — are about as bleak and remote as anywhere imaginable for human habitation. Indeed, the two islands in the group, named Bering and Medny, support only one hardy community of fewer than 1,000 souls in a settlement called Nikolskoye on Bering...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 8, 2010

Japan's economic fantasy

HONG KONG — Belatedly, Japan's leading politicians are waking from their coma and realizing that the country's economy is in a massive mess hit by a triple whammy of low growth, heavy debts and an increasingly aging population.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHO'S WHO
Jun 29, 2010

French patissier's dream becomes reality in Japan

When Antoine Santos was growing up in the port of Marseille in southern France, he dreamed of becoming a pastry teacher by the age of 30. Little did he imagine his dream would come true — in Japan.
Japan Times
LIFE
Jun 27, 2010

Asahiyama's natural touch

Ivan the polar bear has been having relationship problems recently.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jun 18, 2010

Lack of funds fail to stop Tokyo's young theater brigade

As a promising playwright, director and actor, 31-year-old Junichi Hirota highlights a cruel fact running through Japan's theater world — namely that once technicians such as lighting engineers, sound people and set-builders are paid from box-office profits, there's often little or nothing left for...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Apr 23, 2010

Different by design

HOLLYWOOD — Tim Burton, the filmmaker who gave a new spin to the classic children's book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," has now taken up the challenge of a greater classic, "Alice in Wonderland."
JAPAN
Apr 20, 2010

Finance officials come up with work-habit ideas

A Finance Ministry project team compiled a set of proposals Monday to reform the ministry, focusing on achieving a more efficient working style and better work-life balance for its bureaucrats.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Apr 11, 2010

Under the volcano, Iwate's capital keeps its rich history alive

The signs of boredom on this first morning in Morioka are manifest. Arriving ill-equipped for the pouring rain, there is a limit to how much interest can be squeezed from the otherwise admirable station facilities. After two hours of window- shopping and an over-surfeit of canned coffees, I'm ready for...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Mar 26, 2010

The colorful visions of a perpetual tourist

Beneath a hazy moon, a party is in full swing at a mountainside terrace overlooking the endless twinkling lights of a city that may or may not be Los Angeles.
JAPAN / Media / Japan Pulse
Mar 9, 2010

Internet Go BOOM: Visual Kei's Deep Throat

In a long interview with Tokyo Damage Report, an anonymous music executive familiar with the Visual Kei scenes lights a short fuse.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Mar 7, 2010

Yoshiharu Fukuhara: 'Mr. Shiseido' blends beauty and business

In July 1942, seven months after the attack on Pearl Harbor that started the Pacific War, Tokyo hosted one of the most ambitious exhibitions of art the world had ever seen. "Leonardo da Vinci," staged in an exhibition hall in the central district of Ueno, featured 600 exhibits by and related to the Italian...
Japan Times
SOCCER / J. League
Mar 2, 2010

Finke's vision slowly taking root at Urawa

Volker Finke knew his job was not going to be easy when he took over as manager of Urawa Reds last season, and so it proved.

Longform

Mount Fuji is considered one of Japan's most iconic symbols and is a major draw for tourists. It's still a mountain, though, and potential hikers need to properly prepare for any climb.
What it takes to save lives on Mount Fuji