Donald Richie - The Japan Times

Today's print edition

Subscribe for more access

Meta

Donald Richie

Donald Richie began writing regularly for The Japan Times in 1954, initially writing film and stage reviews. In the early '70s he began writing book reviews and continued contributing until 2009. He wrote more than 40 books on Japanese aesthetics, and he is widely considered the pre-eminent expert on Japanese cinema.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Aug 4, 2002

Shock of the new: modernism as a cultural force

TOPOGRAPHIES OF JAPANESE MODERNISM. By Seiji M. Lippit. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, 301 pp., $22.50 (paper) Among the many results of the 19th-century "opening" of Japan to the West was a truly massive internalization of foreign culture, one which is now so advanced that concepts such...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jul 28, 2002

Images of harmony between man and nature

THE SIGN OF LIFE, photographs by Yoshiko Seino, text by Asako Imaeda. Tokyo: Osiris, 2002, unpaginated, 60 full-page plates, 7,000 yen (cloth) In her text to this important collection of photographs, Asako Imaeda writes of its "strange harmony, a precarious harmony that is the result of the introduction...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jul 21, 2002

Let's have some quiet, please

SPACES FOR SILENCE, text by Caro Ness, photos by Alen MacWeeney. Foreword by Ruth La Feria. Tokyo/Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2001, 142 pp., 135 color plates, 4,500 yen (cloth) The late Jiddu Krishnamurti once said that religion is frozen thought, and that out of it one builds temples. The implication...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jul 14, 2002

Medieval-age scholar cleaves reality from romantic illusion

As Mitsuo Kure points out at the beginning of this excellent account of the samurai, "a class of people who served the aristocracy with arms," there is still considerable scholarly dispute over when the class emerged and precisely what it consisted of. Though it "led" Japanese society for seven centuries,...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jul 7, 2002

Gone, but not forgotten

MEMORIES OF WIND AND WAVES: A Self-Portrait of Lakeside Japan, by Junichi Saga. Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. Illustrated by Susumu Saga. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2002. 260 pp., with 50 photos and line drawings, 2,500 yen (cloth) Junichi Saga is a physician with a general practice in...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jun 23, 2002

Overcoming the tyranny of distance

TREASON BY THE BOOK: Traitors, Conspirators and Guardians of an Emperor, by Jonathan Spence. London: Penguin Books, 2002, 302 pp. 7.99 UK pounds (paper) In his short story "The Great Wall of China," Franz Kafka wonderfully evokes the enormity and complexity of imperial China by describing the travails...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jun 16, 2002

Tribute to a humanist

THE KANETO SHINDO ANTHOLOGY. Asmik Ace Entertainment, Inc. DVD collection, 21 discs (some optional English subtitles) and program booklet (Japanese only), 2002, 79,000 yen. This massive four-volume collection is devoted to the main works of one of the major film directors of the immediate post-World...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jun 9, 2002

Words that rode on the high notes

KABUKI PLAYS ON STAGE: Volume I -- Brilliance and Bravado, 1697-1766, edited by James R. Brandon and Samuel L. Leiter. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001, 192 pp., profusely illustrated, $48 (cloth) This is the first volume in a monumental four-volume series that brings together the texts of...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Jun 2, 2002

Tickling Japan's funnybone

THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE FISH: Japanese Humor Since the Age of the Shoguns, by Howard Hibbett. Tokyo/New York: Kodansha International, 2001, 228 pp., with 40 woodcut-print illustrations, 3,000 yen (cloth) Toward the end of this most agreeable essay on the local comic spirit, Howard Hibbett observes:...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

May 26, 2002

Victor Segalen: searching out the strange to find a way home

VICTOR SEGALEN AND THE AESTHETICS OF DIVERSITY: Journeys Between Cultures, by Charles Forsdick. Oxford University Press, 2000, 242 pp., 40 pounds (cloth) In 1919, 41-year-old Victor Segalen was found dead in a Breton forest, a copy of Shakespeare beside him, the pages opened to "Hamlet." Thus ended the...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

May 19, 2002

Preserving spaces fit for living

JAPANESE COUNTRY STYLE: Putting New Life Into Old Houses, by Yoshihiro Takishita. Forward by Peter M. Grilli. Preface by Sachiko Amakasu. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2002, 168 pp., more than 200 color and b/w photographs, floor plans, maps, etc; a bilingual edition. 4,800 yen (cloth) In this stimulating...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

May 12, 2002

The complete picture

The late Hiroshi Teshigahara was not only the "iemoto" (head) of the Sogetsu school of ikebana and a noted traditional potter, he was also a film director of international fame, best known for his 1964 picture "Woman in the Dunes." The sumptuously designed DVD collection "Teshigara Hiroshi no Sekai"...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

May 5, 2002

Memories are made of this

TOKYO CENTRAL: A Memoir, by Edward Seidensticker. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002, 256 pp. with b/w photographs, XXXVI. $30 (cloth) Translator extraordinaire, historian and beloved pedagogue, Edward Seidensticker has given us the definitive English versions of "The Tale of Genji" and the...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Apr 14, 2002

Reflecting the author at twice his natural size

A PILGRIMAGE TO ANGKOR. By Pierre Loti. Translated by W.P. Baines. Edited and introduced by Michael Smithies. With photographs by Euayporn Kerchouay. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1999 (revised edition), 107 pp., 22 color plates, 395 baht (paper) On an April evening in 1865, Louis Marie Julien Viaud, then...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Apr 7, 2002

Art in the service of empire

WAR, OCCUPATION, AND CREATIVITY: Japan and East Asia -- 1920-1960, edited by Marlene J. Mayo and J. Thomas Rimer with H. Eleanor Kerkham. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001. 406 pp., with 66 b/w plates and numerous photos and drawings. $60 (cloth); $29.95 (paper) "No art, however pure, can be...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Mar 31, 2002

These are a few of our favorite things

THINGS JAPANESE, by Nicholas Bornoff, with photos by Michael Freeman. Hong Kong: Periplus Editions, Ltd. 2002. 144 pp., profusely illustrated with full-color plates, $24.95 (paper) In 1890, Tokyo University professor Basil Hall Chamberlain codified an entire generation's view of Japan in his "Things...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Mar 24, 2002

The past made perfect

THE POLITICS OF RUINS AND THE BUSINESS OF NOSTALGIA, by Maurizio Peleggi. Studies in Contemporary Thailand, No. 10, forward by Craig J. Reynolds. Bangkok: White Lotus Press., 2002, 100 pp., 450 baht (paper) Now that Kyoto is to all intents "Kyotoland," it might be instructive to turn to other countries...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Mar 17, 2002

Pampered pachyderms and groveling courtiers

SIAMESE COURT LIFE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY AS DEPICTED IN EUROPEAN SOURCES, by Dhiravat na Pombejra. Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University, 2001, 236 pp., 190 baht. Foreign dignitaries were amazed by the 17th-century Siamese court. Though the general population seemed, as one diplomat wrote, "rich in...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Mar 10, 2002

Caught between two parallel worlds: growing up under the Raj

OUT OF INDIA: A Raj Childhood, by Michael Foss. London: Michael O'Mara Books, 2001, 181 pp., xC820 (cloth) The Raj began in 1818 when the Rajput states of central and northern India and much else of the country came under British "protection," an occupation that ended only in 1948. Many accounts exist...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Mar 3, 2002

Together, they made magic

THE EMPEROR AND THE WOLF: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, by Stuart Galbraith IV. Faber & Faber, 2002, 848 pp. 32 pp. of b/w photos, $40 (cloth) Many directors have favorite actors and many actors have favorite directors. One thinks of John Ford and John Wayne, Ingmar Bergman...

You can often see generations of families enjoying performances together at Fuji Rock Festival.

Japan’s summer music festivals are feeling the heat in more ways than one

Akiko Trush says her experience with the neurological disorder dystonia left her feeling like she wanted to chop her own hand off.

The neurological disorder that 'kills culture'

By Tomoko Otake

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Omron helping firms achieve carbon neutrality

Omron helping firms achieve carbon neutrality

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTS

SUPPLEMENTS BINDER

international-reports