author

 
Menu
Search
 
November 22, 2024
 

Today's print edition

Home Delivery
Subscribe for more access
Nobuko Tanaka

Meta

Nobuko Tanaka
Nobuko Tanaka is a stage writer who has regularly contributed contemporary theater and dance articles to The Japan Times since 2001. She also writes for several Japanese and overseas magazines and web sites. As a promoter, she takes Japanese artists to foreign theater festivals.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Sep 9, 2011
Festival/Tokyo rewrites its script after quake
Chiaki Soma, the program director at Festival/Tokyo (F/T), needed to figure out how to proceed with the country's biggest theater festival following the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11. She closed her office for 10 days and asked the staff to carefully consider the meaning of the festival in...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Sep 1, 2011
Sachiko Hara makes her mark in Germany
Tokyo-born Sachiko Hara, 46, was the apple of her ordinary, working-parents' eye. She was encouraged to get a degree in German studies from the prestigious Sophia University, and after that it seemed some sort of high-flying career was hers for the taking.
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Aug 12, 2011
Tokyo theater to promote talent at fest
Komaba Agora Theater will stage a monthlong theater festival this summer, as they have done twice a year since 1989, aimed at exposing young, regional theater companies to a wider audience.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 14, 2011
The future of Japanese theater lies in individuality
In April 2010, Junnosuke Tada became Japan's youngest-ever artistic director of a public theater when, at age 33, he was appointed by the Kirari Fujimi Theater in Fujimi, Saitama Prefecture.
Japan Times
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Jul 8, 2011
Cava hope to help theater buffs feel fine
Tokyo-based mime-theater company Cava is probably better known in Scotland than at home, but that could be about to change.
Japan Times
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Jun 24, 2011
Black Stripe gets weighty with new play
Black Stripe Theater (BST) is the creation of three expatriates residing in Tokyo: Ian Martin, Walter Roberts and Chris Parham. They founded the company in 2007 after meeting through the 115-year-old foreigners' theater company, Tokyo International Players.
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Jun 17, 2011
SPAC says the show must go on in Shizuoka
Satoshi Miyagi, the artistic director of the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC), admitted during a press conference in April that he had thought about calling off the center's international theater festival following the March 11 disasters that hit Japan's northeastern Tohoku region. Finally, though,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jun 16, 2011
You're not alone in feeling lonely
For playwright and director Ryuta Horai, the last two years have been a nonstop whirl of activity since "Mahoroba" ("A splendid location") — his drama about four generations of women in a traditional rural family meeting up and feuding — won the highly prestigious Kishida Kunio Award for best play...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Jun 5, 2011
Amon Miyamoto: Globe-trotting dramatist seeks new horizons
Fifty-three years ago, Amon Miyamoto was born into a world in which he grew up listening to spirited exchanges between leading lights from the stage and showbiz in his father's coffee shop across from the modern-leaning Shinbashi Enbujo outpost of the venerable Kabuki-za theater in Tokyo's smart Ginza...
Japan Times
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Jun 3, 2011
'Bedge Pardon' rethinks famed Soseki sojourn
"Bedge pardon?" Was a phrase that literary giant Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) scribbled into his diary while studying in London. He was describing how it sounded when a servant woman said "I beg your pardon" to him. But far from mocking the woman he nicknamed "Miss Bedge Pardon," Soseki's descriptions...
Japan Times
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
May 27, 2011
Tokyo theater offers butoh performance and lecture
The mission of Theater X (Cai), according to its website, is to stand out from all other theaters in Tokyo, "though they are as numerous as stars in the sky."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
May 12, 2011
Inspired by the West and re-made in Japan
Staging famous Western works, or those from well-known foreign playwrights, is an established feature of contemporary theater in Japan, with Japanese dramatists often adapting or reworking plays so they resonate more with domestic audiences.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Apr 22, 2011
Is everyone in the world still patiently 'Waiting for Godot'?
"Waiting for Godot" is a masterfully minimalist play that allegorically expresses how we all strive to keep at bay the sense of life's ultimate futility. After all, there is only one certainty in our lives: our death.
CULTURE / Stage
Mar 25, 2011
The funny side of hiding in the attic
In 2003, the Tokyo-based theater company Rinkogun received a number of awards for its play "Ura-Yaneura" ("Attic"). Now the play is back in a compelling new form — staged in a mish-mash of languages using the company's actors and others from Indonesia and South Korea.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Mar 24, 2011
Kitamura shows Japanese women how to be 'Top Girls'
"The play was written nearly 30 years ago, but I feel the situation for women has hardly changed at all. In fact, it hasn't fundamentally changed for 100 years, even though Japanese women got the vote around 65 years ago," said theater producer Akiko Kitamura when asked why she chose to stage the well-known...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Mar 4, 2011
It takes innovation, imagination and perseverence to challenge contemporary theater
Recently, while looking through a handful of upcoming production flyers displayed in a cozy, small-scale theater, I noticed to my surprise that one name kept reappearing: Norihito Nakayashiki.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Feb 11, 2011
Playwright Noda asks, 'What is a Japanese?'
In the early 1980s, when he was a student at the University of Tokyo, Hideki Noda began to emerge as a standard bearer of something new in Japan: Contemporary theater by — and for — young people seeking to change their country.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jan 21, 2011
Universal meanings of a poet's personal grief
Apart from glitzy musicals and kabuki, most theatrical stagings in Japan finish their run after a couple of weeks or even a few days. With no long-run system as the norm, unlike Broadway or the West End, by the time a buzz has got around that something is good, it will almost always have closed or be...
CULTURE / Stage
Dec 31, 2010
A great year for theater innovation
Japan's drama scene has seen some change in 2010. It was as if the theater crowd grew tired of waiting for the country's ailing economy and faltering politics to offer them anything new to work with and decided to go and find their own inspiration.
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Dec 17, 2010
Can you tell me how to get to 'Avenue Q'?
In March 2003, "Avenue Q" opened at the Vineyard Theatre in New York as one of dozens of off-Broadway productions. Audiences described the show as quirky, cute and unique, and within five months it moved to Broadway and won three Tony Awards — including the best musical for that year.
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

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

mission sustainability vol.12 : Kose Corp.Kose takes pride in creating beauty in the world
mission sustainability vol.12 : Kose Corp.Kose takes pride in creating beauty in the world

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTS note

Read more

SUPPLEMENTS BINDER