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Mark Schilling
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 15, 2013
When young creators answer the big city's siren call
Veteran scriptwriter and director Toshiyuki Morioka had more than a professional interest in making his new film "Jokyo Monogatari." Based on an autobiographical manga by Rieko Saibara, its story of an aspiring artist coming to Tokyo to learn her trade and make her fortune was his as well.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 15, 2013
'Jokyo Monogatari'
So many Japanese have relocated to Tokyo over the years to make their fortunes — or simply to escape rural poverty — that there is a word to describe the act: jōkyō (which the dictionary defines as "proceeding to the capital [Tokyo]"). Something similar in English would be "New York" as a verb:...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 15, 2013
Various Toho war films
Director: Various
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 8, 2013
'Homesick'
I once had a promising career as a teacher at a city day-care center in Hollywood (yes, that Hollywood). For one thing, I enjoyed interacting (translation: playing) with my charges, mostly African-American kids aged 9 to 12. For another, I liked making stuff with and for them, including a multi-story...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 1, 2013
'Eiga: Nazotoki wa Dinner no Ato de (The After-Dinner Mysteries)'
Japanese love mysteries, in print and on the screen, but foreigners, by and large, don't take to Japanese mystery movies. For decades, Japanese producers were happy to concentrate on the big domestic market for local whodunit films, while making only half-hearted attempts to sell them abroad to largely...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 1, 2013
'Kurenai no Buta (Porco Rosso)'
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
CULTURE / Film
Jul 25, 2013
There's a royal problem in portraying the ruler
Akira Kurosawa once told me that if he were to make a film about the Emperor, "I would probably be killed. ... Even if the film were highly positive, just the fact that I was using the Emperor as a character would be enough to make (the rightists) mad."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 25, 2013
'Akaboshi'
I used to attract proselytizers, usually some variety of Christian, when I was thumbing around the United States in the early 1970s. Unlike most drivers who offered me rides, they didn't want a captive ear for their personal confessions or rants. Instead they relentlessly quizzed me on the state of...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 25, 2013
'Shokuzai (Penance)'
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
CULTURE / Books
Jul 20, 2013
Paying a price in Japan for showing up authority
After Japan's defeat in World II, its art world fell into the same flux as the rest of the society, as the rules and values that had governed it for decades suddenly vanished. Styles and movements once censored and banned, from Soviet-style socialist realism to surrealism, were now permitted and even...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 18, 2013
'Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises)'
Whenever Hayao Miyazaki, now 72, makes a film, fans and critics weigh it against this anime master's past triumphs — and often find it wanting. Japanese critics, especially, fondly recall the films that Miyazaki directed at the start of his long career as peaks. That is, 1979's "Lupin Sansei: Cagliostro...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 18, 2013
'Godzilla'
Director: Roland Emmerich
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 11, 2013
'Shanidaru no Hana (The Flower of Shanidar)'
Gakuryu Ishii has made something of a career of confounding fans and critics alike with his big shifts in artistic direction, his long silences and, in 2010, his name change from the unusual, if memorable, Sogo to the pretentious, if still hard-to-forget, Gakuryu (a combination of the kanji for "mountain"...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 11, 2013
'The Garden of Words (Koto no Ha no Niwa)'
Director: Makoto Shinkai
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 4, 2013
Tsuchiya questions what it means to be human
I first met Yutaka Tsuchiya in 1999 when I interviewed him on the release of "Atarashii Kamisama (The New God)," his documentary centering on a rightist punk band and its charismatic lead singer, Karin Amamiya. Despite his left-leaning politics, Tsuchiya was anything but the rigid ideologue; in fact,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 4, 2013
'Thallium Shojo no Dokusatsu Nikki (GFP Bunny)'
Every once in awhile a movie sees around the corner to where the culture is heading. Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" (1971) was released when baby boomers were still baking granola and dreaming of communal peace and love, but its dystopian vision of ultra violence being visited on random strangers...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 4, 2013
'Momo no Tegami (A Letter to Momo)'
Director: Hiroyuki Okiura
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 28, 2013
'Senkyo 2 (Campaign 2)'
In the more than three decades I've lived here, I have progressed (if that is the right word) from irritation at the oddness of Japanese election campaigns to something like curiosity. How, I once wondered, could anyone choose intelligently among candidates whose "dialogue" with the voters was mostly...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 28, 2013
Documenting Japan's 'strange' election campaigns
A native of Tochigi Prefecture and a graduate of the University of Tokyo, where he majored in religious studies, Kazuhiro Soda took an early turn off a conventional career path when he went to New York in 1993 to study filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts. After a stab at fiction filmmaking, which...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 28, 2013
'Chronicle of My Mother'
Director: Masato Harada

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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?