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 Roger Pulvers

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Roger Pulvers
Roger Pulvers is an author, playwright, theater director and translator who divides his time between Tokyo and Sydney. He has published more than 40 books. His latest book in English is "The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn."
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 29, 2000
Sexism remains a rampant social disease
I am fortunate to be able to count among my relatives a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter. Felix, appointed to the court by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was a cousin on my mother's side of the family and, needless to say, far removed from me in age.
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 22, 2000
Bidding goodbye to the monoculture myth
Some years ago I was sitting at the counter of a rather exclusive sushi restaurant in the Roppongi district of Tokyo when I noticed that a middle-age man a few stools along was making monosyllabic comments each time I ordered a morsel of sushi or slipped one into my mouth.
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 15, 2000
Where do the Japanese stand today?
A malaise is abroad in Japan and that malaise is apathy and hopelessness. Ever since the Meiji era -- 1868-1912 -- when the modern state of Japan was established and developed, the one thing that the Japanese people imbued their national effort, their prodigious diligence, with was a sense of hope: that...
CULTURE / Books
Sep 30, 2000
Thomas Wolfe: 20th-century America's warped looking glass
"No one has ever written any books about America -- I mean the real America," he wrote to a friend in 1931.
CULTURE / Stage
Jun 6, 2000
Inspecting society's 'little people'
Ever since the first performance of Nikolai Gogol's "The Inspector" took place on April 19, 1836, Russia and the world have been fascinated by Khlestakov, a character in the play who poses as a government inspector and gets away with murder.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 9, 2000
An Australian ethnic model for Japan?
Sophisticated and exquisite, the city of Adelaide in the state of South Australia was my home for the month of February. I have been coming to this city since 1976, and I now see it as a clear symbol of the profound transformation that has overtaken a country that was once a backwater of various repugnant...
CULTURE / Stage
Mar 5, 2000
Who's afraid of August Strindberg?
If a single metaphor could speak for the career and life of Sweden's greatest playwright and author, it would be the following taken from one of his novels: "We were dancing on the edge of the volcano."
COMMUNITY
Jan 19, 2000
Lafcadio Hearn: interpreter of two disparate worlds
He created an illusion and lived his days and nights within its confines. That illusion was his Japan. He found in Japan the ideal coupling of the cerebral and the sensual, mingled and indistinguishable, the one constantly recharging the other and affording him the inspiration to write.
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 11, 1999
Crown tops bush hat, for now
Two definitive historical events of the past quarter-century have determined the agenda for 21st-century Australia: the dismissal of the Whitlam government by Governor General John Kerr in November 1975; and the defeat of the republican cause in the referendum of November 1999.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 22, 1999
'Advance Australia fair' takes on a whole new meaning
"There goes another shiftless Aboriginal," said the Pioneer bus driver to those of us taking the half-day tour of Alice Springs. "We give them cars, they drive them till they're out of petrol, then, bloody hell, they just leave the bloody things by the side of the road."

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