Nobuko Tanaka - The Japan Times

August 15, 2024

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Nobuko Tanaka

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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.

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Sociologist Gracia Liu-Farrer argues that even though immigration doesn't figure into Japan's autobiography, it is more of a self-perception than a reality.

In search of the ‘Japanese dream’

By Thu-Huong Ha

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