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November 22, 2024
 

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Mark Schilling
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 5, 2010
'Gekijo-ban Kenka Bancho: Zenkoku Seiha'
Fights were a spectator sport at my rural Pennsylvania high school. One guy would call out another and after classes the combatants would square off on a patch of ground outside school property, surrounded by a circle of friends and hangers-on. The typical finish was the victor straddling the prostrate...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 26, 2010
'Ningen Shikkaku'/'Saru Lock the Movie'
Based on Osamu Dazai's most famous novel, Genjiro Arato's "Ningen Shikkaku" ("The Fallen Angel") is a characteristic gamble for the veteran producer/ director, known for rushing in where others fear to tread.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 19, 2010
'Parade'
How much do we really know about anyone? This thought, the basis of many a paranoid delusion, is grounded in a human fact: We are all locked inside our own heads, communicating only a small fraction of our thoughts and feelings to others, when we are not actively misrepresenting them.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media
Feb 14, 2010
An 'eroduction' to Japan's saucy cinema
The Nikkatsu studio is the Japanese film industry's oldest — it will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2012. In the 1950s and early 1960s it was also a box-office leader, turning out hit after hit with Japan's biggest postwar star, Yujiro Ishihara. By the 1970s, however, Nikkatsu and the rest of the...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 12, 2010
'Shokudo Katatsumuri'
Movies about women in crisis who find their mojo through the restaurant/food business are a thriving subgenre in Japanese films, from Naoko Ogigami's Japanese-soul-food-in-Helsinki hit "Kamome Shokudo" ("Seagull Restaurant," 2006) to Mitsuhiro Mihara's "Shiawase no Kaori" ("Flavor of Happiness," 2008)...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 5, 2010
'Kazura'/'Boys on the Run'
The odds of two brilliant Japanese comedies opening the same day are high but not impossible, somewhat like the odds of the same director (James Cameron) making two all-time worldwide box-office hits ("Titanic" and that other film about blue aliens).
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 29, 2010
'Golden Slumber'/'Ototo'
Yoshihiro Nakamura has made a mix of indie and commercial films, from the multilayered, end-of-the-world thriller "Fish Story" (2008) to the hospital mystery "General Rouge no Gaisen" ("The Triumphant General Rouge," 2009). Whatever the subject, he always injects his personal obsessions, from the shape-shifting...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 15, 2010
'Kondo wa Aisaika'
Japanese film marriages are as diverse as the real things, ranging from the uncommunicative couple of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Tokyo Sonata" (2008) to the doting pair of the "Tsuri Baka Nisshi" ("Dairy of a Fishing Fool") series (1988-2009), though the easy-going wife of the fishing-mad salaryman hero has...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 8, 2010
A feast for film buffs
The Japanese film industry, at least the top end where Toho and its media partners dwell, is looking forward to a prosperous 2010, with a lineup of crowd-pleasers that should thump the Hollywood competition.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 8, 2010
' Bandage'
Shunji Iwai was once Japan's hottest young director following the smash success of "Love Letter," a 1995 film about a woman who writes a letter to her dead lover — and gets a reply.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 25, 2009
' Higanjima'
Hollywood likes its action movies fast and furious, their plot lines reducible to a phrase.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 18, 2009
'Snow Prince'
An anonymous poster on 2Channel — Japan's popular message-board site — once listed the elements that make for a successful Japanese melodrama as 1. Children 2. Animals 3. Poverty 4. Sickness, and 5. Death.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 18, 2009
Back to basic instincts
Mamoru Oshii is best known here and abroad as an anime auteur whose works, from the seminal dystopian SF "Kokaku Kidotai" ("Ghost in the Shell," 1995) to the air-action epic "Sky Crawlers" (2008), have often viewed the future of humanity through a glass darkly.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 11, 2009
A decade when Japan's cinema stood up to Hollywood menace
When I started reviewing Japanese films for The Japan Times in 1989, many of the people making and distributing them were convinced that the Hollywood juggernaut was slowly crushing them. How could they hope to compete against superior Hollywood technology and vastly larger Hollywood budgets?
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 11, 2009
And the best Japanese films of 2009 were . . .
1. "Fish Story":
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 4, 2009
'Yomigaeri no Chi'
Drugs can finish you off in Japanese show business. One bust for possession spells the end to offers of every kind, from ad deals to drama-series roles to Christmas tree lightings. Theaters pull your latest film, your agency fires you and nobody wants to know you but your dog. In Hollywood, celebrity...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Nov 27, 2009
'Black Gaisha ni Tsutometerundaga mo Ore wa Genkai Kamo Shirenai'
Films about Japanese organization men, from bureaucrats to salarymen, have long broadly divided into two categories — the serious ones, that portray work life as a sort of holy war, fought by loyal, self-sacrificing blue-suited soldiers, and the comic, whose characters range from pompous idiots to...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Nov 20, 2009
'Tsumuji Kaze Shokudo no Yoru'
Take a quaint European-looking restaurant in a quiet Hokkaido town in the dead of winter. Add quirky regulars who are treated to nightly disquisitions, philosophical and otherwise, by the avuncular owner of a local hat shop. Toss in scrumptious- looking "set menus" of steaks, croquettes and other Western-...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Nov 13, 2009
'Zero no Shoten'
Mystery writer Seicho Matsumoto (1909-1992) was long to the Japanese entertainment industry what Stephen King has been to Hollywood — a one-man fiction factory who supplied material for dozens of films and TV dramas.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Nov 6, 2009
'Sideways'
Hollywood has long been an enthusiastic remaker of foreign films, including ones from Japan. Kurosawa was an early favorite since his samurai could easily be repurposed as cowboys, beginning with "The Magnificent Seven," the 1960 remake of "The Seven Samurai," (1954).
Two of America’s biggest debt holders are dumping Treasurys
The U.S. Treasury building in Washington. Investors in Japan and China sold a pile of U.S. debt in the last quarter, just before the U.S. presidential election.
Russia fired experimental ballistic missile at Ukraine, Putin says
Ukrainian firefighters work on a spot following an airstrike in Dnipro on Thursday.
Ishiba aggravates his own political failures with diplomatic faux pas
Prime Minster Shigeru Ishiba is greeted at the APEC summit in Lima by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday. The Japanese leader was criticized for remaining seated while meeting several world leaders at the event.
Japan's 3.31 million visitors in October set monthly record
Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto in December 2023. Famous autumn leaf colors contributed to increased tourism demand last month from many markets across Asia, Europe and North America, the Japan National Tourism Organization has said.
Japan ranks last in romance satisfaction for second straight year
In a survey of 31 countries, Japan ranked last in terms of those who felt loved, with just 51% of respondents saying so.
The slow-burn success of ‘A Samurai in Time’
A 19th-century warrior gets struck by lightning and wakes to find himself in 21st-century Kyoto in Junichi Yasuda’s surprise hit “A Samurai in Time.”
Around a quarter of Japan married couples in their 20s met through dating apps
A survey released by an organization promoting “Good Couples Day” shows that 24% of couples in their 20s met their marriage partner through a dating app.
'Tokyo Swindlers': Get deep into the minds of real estate con artists
In Ko Shinjo's "Tokyo Swindlers," a group of con artists manipulates real estate giants into falsified deals within the highly competitive, quick market.
Japan, U.K. and Italy discuss inviting more countries to joint fighter project
A new concept model of a next-generation fighter jet to be jointly developed by Japan, Britain and Italy is on display in Farnborough, Hampshire, in July.
Haruki Murakami's 'The City and Its Uncertain Walls' gives deep deja vu
For “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” translated into English by Philip Gabriel, Haruki Murakami confronts the ghosts who won't leave him alone.

Podcast

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

Longform

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

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