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April 05, 2025
 

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Mark Schilling
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 19, 2010
'Hana no Ato (After the Flowers)'/'Hanbun no Tsuki ga Noboru Sora'
Women have been wielding swords in Japanese period actioners for decades now, from the days when Junko Fuji and Meiko Kaji were slicing up bad guys, Fuji with stoic grace, Kaji with icy rage.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 12, 2010
Yazaki opens up about 'Lies'
A leader of Japanese cinema's 1990s New Wave, Hitoshi Yazaki dropped off the radar for more than a decade, returning in 2006 with "Strawberry Shortcakes," a widely praised drama about four lonely women in search of, not just a partner, but reasons for living. In his new film, "Sweet Little Lies," the...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 12, 2010
'Sweet Little Lies'
Marriages are strange creatures. They can die suddenly, when from the outside everything seems fine, or they can linger on for years when it's obvious to everyone, including the two principals, that it's all over.
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...
U.S. tourist arrested after bringing a handgun into Japan
Hyogo police believe the handgun a U.S. tourist inadvertently brought into Japan slipped through security procedures at Kansai International Airport in Osaka Prefecture.
3D printer used to construct train station building in Japan
A train station building (front) is assembled from parts printed using 3D printer technology, in Arida, Wakayama Prefecture, on Wednesday.
Japan’s leader didn’t read the job description
Prime Minister and ruling Liberal Democratic Party leader Shigeru Ishiba is facing a political funding scandal that has damaged his reputation and sparked speculation that internal efforts to remove him are underway.
Japan promises 'bold and speedy' response to Trump’s surprise 24% tariffs
U.S. President Donald Trump unveils new U.S. tariffs at the White House in Washington on Wednesday.
Tokyo’s KK Line to close for decadelong overhaul as public greenway
People enjoy running and yoga on Tokyo Expressway’s KK Line, a 2-kilometer elevated expressway cutting through the capital’s commercial Ginza district, when it was opened as a pedestrian space in May last year.
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.
Meiji says sayonara to bottled milk, a staple of Japan's bathhouses
Meiji bottled milk lined up in a fridge at Kosugiyu, a bathhouse in Tokyo. The sticker urges patrons to enjoy the milk one last time before it’s gone.
A Canadian made a weekend trip to Costco a Japanese pastime
Under the watchful eye of Ken Theriault, Costco representative director and Japan country manager, the American membership-model wholesaler has flourished in Japan.

Podcast

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

Longform

Professional cleaner Hirofumi Sakurai takes a moment to appreciate some photographs in a Gotanda apartment whose occupant died alone.
The last cleanup: Life and death in a lonely Japan
By Johan Brooks

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