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April 08, 2025
 

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Mark Schilling
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 5, 2015
Cannibalism and confusion in live-action 'Attack on Titan'
Stories about giants are ancient and universal. It isn't hard to understand why: Children are born into a world populated by big, lurching terrors with bad breath and enormous teeth — or is that Uncle Frank just trying to be chummy?
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 29, 2015
'Obon no Ototo' is one director's attempt to portray his real life through a fictional self
'Life imitates art far more than art imitates life," quipped Oscar Wilde, but in the film world mining one's own life for the sake of art — or rather, a script — is an ancient and hallowed practice. The resulting film, however, may have only a tenuous relationship with the filmmaker's actual biography....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film / Wide Angle
Jul 29, 2015
Tokyo International Film Festival promises a more diverse selection this year
Second-guessing the programming of the annual Tokyo International Film Festival is a favorite sport of movie types in Japan — I've been doing it myself for years.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 22, 2015
War in the jungle and war in Japan
Actor and director Shinya Tsukamoto often takes violence to strange extremes. In his first film, the 1989 horror "Tetsuo" ("Tetsuo: The Iron Man"), a businessman accidentally kills a crazed metal fetishist (played by Tsukamoto himself) with his car and, becoming "infected" by his victim, horrifically...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 22, 2015
A second look at bloody WWII novel 'Fires on the Plain'
Japanese war films typically frame themselves as anti-war, even when they glorify the sacrifices made by brave Japanese boys in defense of the homeland, as in the 2013 hit "Eien no Zero" ("The Eternal Zero").
CULTURE / Film / Wide Angle
Jul 15, 2015
Hayao Miyazaki cleans up Japan
Rich, famous, semi-retired people commonly take up good causes (based on whatever they define as "good"), but animation maestro Hayao Miyazaki does things differently.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 15, 2015
Successor to Hayao Miyazaki's throne turns Shibuya into a realm of beasts
Mamoru Hosoda ranks first among the Japanese animation directors seen as successors to now-retired industry giant Hayao Miyazaki — and for good reason.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 8, 2015
Mass murder and Sion Sono
A disturbed individual kills, and the media searches for reasons why. Sometimes, the killer obligingly cites a pop culture phenomenon as inspiration. Mark David Chapman, the man who shot John Lennon, saw himself as the living embodiment of Holden Caulfield, the hero of J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 8, 2015
Rural migration, shaved ice and no easy endings in 'Umi no Futa'
Why not abandon your stressed urban existence, move to a picturesque part of the world and live the simple life? An old dream, but still powerful, as shown by the recent spate of Japanese movies about women getting back their grooves by relocating to a beautiful middle-of-nowhere. Usually their dream...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 1, 2015
Sion Sono is back with buckets of blood and a three-faced heroine in 'Tag'
Sion Sono is a director of extremes — including an extreme dislike of being categorized. Just when you thought you had him pegged as a maker of violent black comedies with classical music scores, such as "Ai no Mukidashi"("Love Exposure"), he turns out heartfelt, albeit still violent, dramas with nuclear...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 24, 2015
Slowing a spiral of negativity in Mipo Oh's 'Being Good'
When I was a student teacher at an elementary school in Livonia, Michigan, I saw some things that shocked me. Once I watched a male teacher grabbing a disruptive fourth-grader by the neck and forcing his head toward the floor, while pouring out a stream of sarcastic abuse upon him.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 17, 2015
Hirokazu Koreeda on his new drama about women with 'shadows'
When Hirokazu Koreeda's gently offbeat family drama "Umimachi Diary" ("Our Little Sister") was screened in competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival, both audiences and the media were enthusiastic — a story for the Reuters news agency described it as "Palme d'Or material." But instead of being...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 17, 2015
John Junkerman documentary 'Okinawa: The Afterburn' sheds light on the ferocious anger against U.S. bases
The issue of the large U.S. military presence in Okinawa is divisive, deeply rooted and, frankly, one I have never completely understood. Anti-base protests have been going on for decades, and while locals elsewhere in the developed world may have been unhappy with the bases in their vicinity, the Okinawans...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 10, 2015
Japan's toxic prophets are revealed in 'Yokokuhan' adaptation
Directors of the better Japanese commercial films typically carve out thematic or stylistic niches for themselves, so that even if they do a manga adaptation for the masses, it's their kind of manga filmed in their kind of way. One is Yoshihiro Nakamura, a master of mysteries and thrillers with brainteaser...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film / Wide Angle
Jun 10, 2015
Where to find Japanese films screening in Tokyo with English subtitles
When I first started watching Japanese films at cinemas in Tokyo nearly three decades ago, screenings with English subtitles were nonexistent. I spent a month with my Japanese teacher at the time studying the script of Akira Kurosawa's "Kagemusha"("The Shadow Warrior") so I could puzzle out its feudal-era...
CULTURE / Film
Jun 3, 2015
Director Kawase disregards criticism of her sentimental leprosy drama 'An'
When I first interviewed Naomi Kawase in 1998, after she won the Cannes Film Festival's Camera d'Or award for her first feature, "Moe no Suzaku" ("Suzaku"), I remarked on her "quietly stubborn determination" to persist in the face of various detractors. If anything, criticism has increased in the intervening...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 3, 2015
Director Naomi Kawase has finally made a 'real Japanese film'
Sooner or later, many Japanese directors — be they internationally acclaimed auteurs or industry outsiders — end up making what Sion Sono (a noted auteur/outsider himself) once described to me as "a real Japanese film." To put it simply, this sort of film is aimed squarely at the domestic audience,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 27, 2015
Widower haunted by his burger-eating comedian wife in 'Till Death Do Us Part?'
Japanese audiences love to cry — hence the decades-long stream of films featuring the terminally ill. The current outpouring, however, seems to be a byproduct of Japan's aging society and improved standards of medical care.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film / Wide Angle
May 27, 2015
Could Kiyoshi Kurosawa's win at Cannes change Japan's luck?
Kiyoshi Kurosawa won the best director prize in the Cannes Film Festival's Un Certain Regard section on Sunday, but he also deserves a prize from the Japanese film industry for single-handedly turning its presence at the world's most prestigious film festival from a vague embarrassment to a cause for...
CULTURE / Film
May 21, 2015
Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia searches for that 1-in-5,000 movie
Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia director Seigo Tono has been with the event since its second edition in 2000, when it was called the American Short Shorts Film Festival and showed only U.S. films. Since then it has evolved into what Tono describes as "a global event, featuring cutting-edge shorts from...
Nissan says it will not take new U.S. orders for Mexican-built Infiniti SUVs
A Nissan manufacturing complex in Aguascalientes, Mexico. Nissan says it will not take new orders from the United States for two Mexican-built Infiniti SUVs following new auto tariffs levied by the U.S.
Why Japan is running out of rice — and farmers to grow it
An ongoing shortage of rice has resulted in rising prices for Japan's main food staple.
Nikkei plunges in third-biggest daily loss ever amid Trump tariff concerns
Pedestrians stand in front of an electronic board showing the numbers of the Nikkei Stock Average on the Tokyo Stock Exchange along a street in the Japanese capital on Monday.
Ride-hailing services spreading in Japan
Vehicles used for ride-hailing services in the city of Kiryu, in Gunma Prefecture
Taiwan eyes zero tariffs with U.S., pledges more investment
Kids view the area from a lookout point over cranes and containers at the Port of Keelung, Taiwan, on Thursday.
‘Let’s make it practical’: NATO chief eyes greater defense-industrial ties with Japan
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte plans to visit Japan on Tuesday and Wednesday — his first to the Indo-Pacific region since taking office in October, as he seeks to implement lessons from the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Tottori takes a bold leap forward in the arts
The city of Kurayoshi in Tottori Prefecture celebrated the opening of its public art museum with festivities such as a parade that drew 1,000 revelers.
Haruki Murakami TV adaptation revisits 30 years of watershed moments
Though Haruki Murakami's trademark whiff of offbeat existentialism is threaded throughout NHK's "After the Quake," the final episode — conceived as a sequel to the story "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo" — is the most stylized, featuring an anthropomorphic talking frog (voiced by Non) and his erstwhile associate Katagiri (Koichi Sato).
Nintendo to launch the Switch 2 on June 5
The controllers for the Switch 2 will attach to the console magnetically rather than sliding on rails as with the original device.
A new human trafficking trend emerges from Myanmar scam centers
Victims of scam centers who were tricked or trafficked into working in Myanmar gather at a compound inside KK Park, a fraud center on the country's border with Thailand, after a multinational crackdown in February.

Podcast

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.
Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Longform

An ongoing shortage of rice has resulted in rising prices for Japan's main food staple.
Why Japan is running out of rice — and farmers to grow it
By Alex K.T. Martin

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