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
Dec 10, 2014
Real-life Japan caricature cuts to the quick
Tomohiro Maekawa, the 40-year-old playwright, director and founder of Tokyo's Ikiume (Buried Alive) theater company, is acclaimed in Japan's theater world for his groundbreaking sci-fi works sometimes bordering on the surreal.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Dec 3, 2014
Screen icon's son brings women's rights to the stage
"Since I was a child, I always wanted to devote my life to film as my father did," Kenta Fukasaku said during a recent chat in which his late, great role model, the charismatic movie director Kinji Fukasaku, often figured.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Nov 19, 2014
Emoto's 'Shrew' questions to provoke
"If I were a man doing the same work, no one would make any special mention of my gender, but I find I'm always being referred to by the media as 'the female director, Junko Emoto.' I don't want to say that's right or wrong, but it reminds me that this is today's reality," the Tokyo-based artist said...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Oct 29, 2014
High drama at Festival/Tokyo
News in March that 38-year-old Chiaki Soma had suddenly been removed from the post of program director of Festival/Tokyo, which she had held since it started in 2009, set many theater lovers worrying about the future of the flagship drama event whose stature at home and abroad had only grown with her...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Oct 22, 2014
Japan's 'unknown' record-breakers eye high-tech horizons on stage and off
Siro-A is going where no Japanese performing artists have gone before, as the all-action troupe this month launched into not its first, or second — but its third three-month West End run since its "Technodelic Visual Show" in 2013.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Oct 8, 2014
Noda's 'Half Gods' powers up in all-Korean revival
In July 2009, Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre's strategic relaunch with an artistic director in place of the suits who formerly oversaw its bookings was somewhat muted.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Oct 1, 2014
Kafka's worm takes a high-tech turn
"I work a lot in France, where manga and anime are enormously popular, although many theater producers think they are basically for children and are often too violent. However, they regard my robot theater as being an essentially Japanese art form," the pioneering dramatist Oriza Hirata said recently...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Sep 24, 2014
As festival's renown goes global, director hails its local role
Since its launch in 2010, Kyoto Experiment has steadily come to rival, if not even surpass, Festival/Tokyo as the nation's leading annual showcase for cutting-edge performances.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Sep 10, 2014
Nagatsuka probes into Pinter's 'Betrayal'
"During the 2010 Tokyo run of my play 'Anti-clockwise Wonderland,' I held a reading workshop of 'Betrayal.' That set me thinking I'd like to act one of the men in the love-triangle drama. So now at last I find myself doing that — and directing as well," Keishi Nagatsuka said in a recent interview with...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Sep 3, 2014
'Hamlet' marks take #18 in Shakespeare for Children series
"When I acted a nursemaid in 'Romeo and Juliet' in the first program of this Shakespeare for Children series, I was surprised that no children made fun of a man in that role — they naturally accepted that theater is fundamentally fiction and just enjoyed the play," Seisuke Yamasaki recalled in a recent...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Aug 27, 2014
SGT's oldies take dance in stride
In 2006, when the world-renowned director Yukio Ninagawa announced open auditions for Saitama Gold Theatre — a project he launched with the slogan, "If you are over 55, let's create theater together and go on a foreign tour" — there were cynics eager to brand the applicants as dreamy wannabe Cinderellas...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Aug 20, 2014
'Babel' dance speaks volumes
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet have lots in common.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 30, 2014
Emoto brothers' 'Godot' looks set to startle
"First off, we probably used to think we were too young to do 'Waiting for Godot,' because it's sometimes uncomfortable talking like gnarled old men," 27-year-old Tasuku Emoto said during a recent Japan Times interview with him and his younger brother Tokio, 24, who will play the central roles in Tokyo...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 23, 2014
'Cuckoo's Nest' still flies in the face of oppression
Among the astonishing outburst of new American cinema in the 1970s, Milos Forman's multi-Oscar-winning "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" offered most Japanese moviegoers their first encounter with the peculiarly piercing eyes of Jack Nicholson, who played its central character, Randle P. McMurphy.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 16, 2014
Europe rewards edgy dramatists
Tim Etchells, artistic director of Forced Entertainment, the English company whose "The Coming Storm" was a highlight of last year's Festival/Tokyo, told me then that they now play abroad more than at home — mainly because festival organizers pay their costs. In contrast, producers are loathe to take...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 9, 2014
Lessons of suicidal Cowra breakout remain unlearned
At around 2 a.m. on Saturday, Aug. 5, 1944, 1,104 Japanese soldiers and sailors armed only with knives, forks and a few baseball bats poured out of their huts at the Cowra prisoner-of-war camp 300 km west of Sydney in the Australian state of New South Wales. Charging through a hail of machine-gun fire,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 9, 2014
'Blast!' comes marching back with a '' from its Tokyo drummer
"It was my hugely fortunate destiny to come across 'Blast!' and, as I am 39 this year, I would like to perform it with a heartfelt '39' message [because, in Japanese, three is san and nine is kyu, which is phonetically 'thank you']," Tokyo-born percussionist, composer and performing director Naoki Ishikawa...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jun 18, 2014
Female dramatists dispel gender concern
Last month in Berlin, in a conversation with Annemie Vanackere, artistic director at the city's cutting-edge Hebbel am Ufer company, she was saying how she loved contemporary Japanese theater, and how HAU had worked with several Japanese dramatists. Then she suddenly asked me: "Why were they all men?...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jun 11, 2014
Top young dramatist urges theater toward key role in nation's cultural life
Fifteen months ago, when I interviewed Takahiro Fujita as the most prominent newcomer in Japan's contemporary theater world, the playwright and director declared, "I'm always looking for something new, and I suppose I will always carry on doing that."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jun 4, 2014
Chocolatecake are no sweeties
Its name translates as Chocolatecake Theatre Company, but there's nothing self-indulgent about topics Gekidan Chocolatecake gets its teeth into.
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.
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.
Ruling coalition and DPP strike last-minute deal over economic policy
DPP policy chief Makoto Mahaguchi speaks at the party's policy gathering in Tokyo on Wednesday.
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.
Japanese expats in Asia find community through rugby
The Taiwan Fivewoods celebrate their victory at the 2023 Asian Japanese Rugby Cup in December of last year.
In Fukushima, a weekend of prose, poetry and translation
Aomori-based writer JJ Carter presented on tabletop gaming as creative inspiration for building characters and narratives.
For Dr. Nakamats, aging is just experience in action
Though he didn't win the recent gubernatorial election in Tokyo, the 96-year-old Dr. Nakamats' run was seen as inspirational in Japan's aging society.

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