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Mark Schilling
CULTURE / Film
May 31, 2007
Doing it her own way — Kawase's determined path to success
Naomi Kawase has been tagged as "Japan's leading woman director" since her first feature film, "Moe no Suzaku (Suzaku)," won the Camera d'Or prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 25, 2007
'Ore wa Kimi no Tame ni Koso Shini ni Iku'
Shintaro Ishihara has a lot in common with Michael Moore: Both were long outriders in their particular political cultures, both have been called, more or less rightly, self-promoting blowhards — and both have an outsize talent for show business that has enabled them to imprint their personalities and...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 18, 2007
Unafraid of rightist rage
Directors tend to be articulate types, especially when discussing (or rather spinning) their own films, but Kazuyuki Izutsu has few equals in the art of spoken communication, in or out of the director's chair. From snappy one-liners about dull movies to verbal bombshells aimed at local rightists, Izutsu...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 18, 2007
'Pacchigi! Love & Peace'
In 2004, Kazuyuki Izutsu made "Pacchigi! (Pacchigi! We Shall Overcome Someday)," a serio-comic Romeo and Juliet romance set in 1960s Kyoto. Starring Shun Shioya as a naive high school boy and Erika Sawajiri as the cute-but-tough zainichi (ethnic Korean living in Japan) girl whom he falls for, the film...
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 / Film
May 4, 2007
'Ahiru to Kamo no Coin Locker'
Many directors keep returning to the same themes and motifs again and again. Alfred Hitchcock liked to torture ice queens (Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren), while Luis Bunuel, the master surrealist, subverted everyday reality with bizarre and disturbing imagery, like a sleeper returning to a familiar...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Apr 27, 2007
'Shindo'
How do you portray genius on the screen, if all you have to work with are gifted, but ordinary, humans? If the genius is a real person -- a Mozart, Beethoven or John "A Beautiful Mind" Nash -- the job becomes fairly straightforward: Cast an actor who can suggest the original subject physically and emotionally....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Apr 20, 2007
'Tsukue no Nakami'
Kids often think their teachers live in a box outside classroom hours -- they are shocked when they see Miss Krabappel buying groceries or walking her dog. Guess what kids -- teachers also often have no clue what you do outside school, unless they are informed by parents, social workers or the police....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Apr 13, 2007
'Koishikute'
Okinawa and the other Ryukyu islands are to the rest of Japan somewhat like what Hawaii is to the mainland United States. Both are sun 'n' surf destinations for the multitudes, with local cultures that are perceived as exotically different, but not threateningly so. The natives speak your language, use...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Apr 6, 2007
'Taitei no Ken'
Japanese action-fantasy pics have become big box office, thanks to CG effects sophisticated enough to lure not just the kiddies, but teens and adults. These films, beginning with Masahiro Shinoda's 1999 hit "Fukuro no Shiro (Owl's Castle)" and continuing to Akihito Shiota's recent smash "Dororo," use...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 30, 2007
'Byosoku 5 Centimeters'
As the boundaries between animated and live-action films blur and finally become meaningless (see the graphic-novel look of "300" for a recent example), perhaps a new category is needed -- call it live-mation. In any case, animators in Japan are breaking free of whatever limits on theme and treatment...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 23, 2007
'Mushishi'
Katsuhiro Otomo once had a reputation as a genius anime auteur -- a younger, hipper version of Hayao Miyazaki. His 1988 SF hit "Akira" was unlike anything coming out of the Hollywood animation industry in its dark vision of an atomic-blasted Neo-Tokyo, with its multilayered story of lawless young bikers...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 16, 2007
'Argentine Baba'
Movies about quirky, dysfunctional families are a thriving subgenre in Hollywood, "Little Miss Sunshine" being the most successful recent example. The Japanese make these films as well, but they tend to be more surreal -- or rather manga-esque, as seen in Katsuhito Ishii's "Cha no Aji (Taste of Tea),"...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 9, 2007
'Aoki Ookami'/'Ryu ga Gotoku'
Selling Japanese movies abroad has never been easy -- the industry makes about 1 percent of its box office overseas, but Haruki Kadokawa and Takashi Miike are both working hard to raise that number, if in radically different ways.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 2, 2007
'Matsugane Ransha Jiken'
Nobuhiro Yamashita is one of the great comic talents working in Japanese films and also one of the most unusual. Unlike the many directors and actors here who equate "funny" with "over the top," Yamashita is low-key, ironic and very sharp. If he were an American he might have written for "Curb your Enthusiasm,"...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 1, 2007
Scriptwriter talks about Japan hit 'Letters'
Scriptwriting is something seemingly everyone in Hollywood does, from cab drivers to this year's Oscar host Ellen DeGeneres, who jokingly presented director Martin Scorsese with a script during the telecast. But the percentage of first-time scriptwriters who succeed in getting a feature film made is...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 23, 2007
Ninagawa paints a vivid picture
Born in 1972, Mika Ninagawa is a photographer with a long list of awards, gallery shows, photo books and credits, from fashion magazine spreads to CD covers. Known for her vivid sense of color and composition, Ninagawa has been branching out into video production and now film, with her first feature...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 23, 2007
'Sakuran'
How did "Memoirs of a Geisha" ("Sayuri" here in Japan) get it so drearily wrong -- and Mika Ninagawa's new film, "Sakuran," get it so gloriously right?
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 22, 2007
Feminine mystique
Bicultural superstar Anna Tsuchiya on her role in Mika Ninagawa's acclaimed debut film 'Sakuran'
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 16, 2007
'Exte'
Sion Sono is following what is now a well-traveled career path for Japanese directors: First the indie debut that plays the international festival circuit ("Bicycle Sighs" in 1990), then the cult sensation taken up by the fan boys ("Suicide Club" in 2002), and finally the horror pic that hopefully makes...

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Construction takes place on the Takanawa Gateway Convention Center in Tokyo, slated to open in 2025.
A boom for business tourism in Japan?