Search - beauty

 
 
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Mar 11, 2012

Japan's disasters must prompt a radical rethink of citizens' quality of life

It's a long time now since my first visit to Uluru, the stupendous sandstone formation in Australia's Red Center that European settlers called Ayers Rock, but which has now officially reverted to the name by which it was always known to the Pitjantjatjara Aboriginal people. I had never before seen any...
CULTURE / Art
Mar 8, 2012

"Muneyoshi Yanagi & Old Tamba Pottery"

Muneyoshi Yanagi (1889-1961) dedicated himself to promoting Japanese folk crafts as an art form and making the public aware of the beauty of well-crafted everyday objects. He was the founder of the mingei (folk craft) movement and took the lead in promoting Tamba pottery, which he once described as...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Mar 8, 2012

"Muneyoshi Yanagi & Old Tamba Pottery"

Muneyoshi Yanagi (1889-1961) dedicated himself to promoting Japanese folk crafts as an art form and making the public aware of the beauty of well-crafted everyday objects. He was the founder of the mingei (folk craft) movement and took the lead in promoting Tamba pottery, which he once described as...
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / Japan Pulse
Jan 31, 2012

Danshikai: deals for dudes' night out

Weekends away, with a beauty treatments and mountains of cake? Sounds familiar, right? But with the guys?
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Jan 29, 2012

Naha gardens within a garden

Amere 10-minute walk across busy Route 58 from the polyglot sidewalks, hotels and souvenir shops of Kokusai-dori, the faintly grubby, undulating Chinese boundary walls of a green enclosure announce the presence of a garden known as Fukushu-en.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 20, 2012

'Road to Nowhere' / 'Two-Lane Blacktop'

Every film buff knows the Terence Malick story by now: a visionary director who made a couple of landmark films in the 1970s, then disappeared for two decades before staging a late-life comeback, which culminated with "The Tree of Life" winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year. Fewer know the story...
CULTURE / Books
Dec 11, 2011

No quick, easy path to haiku enlightenment

100 SELECTED HAIKU OF KATO IKUYA, translated with a study by Ito Isao. Chuseki-sha, 2011, 104 pp., ¥3,500 (paperback) Ikuya Kato (born 1929) is a modern haiku poet of the "free verse" school. Haiku itself is probably the shortest form of literature there is. Its classical structure is a cluster of 17...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHO'S WHO
Nov 29, 2011

Jose Alvares finds Portugal-Japan links

Jose Alvares has tried to "reconnect" the Portuguese and Japanese cultures over the last 43 years he has spent in Japan.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 18, 2011

"Modes from Rococo to Art Deco: Make up, Hair and Fashion"

Since ancient times, beauty has been a concern for many women, something that has led to various styles in fashion and makeup within different cultures, philosophies and historical periods.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Nov 13, 2011

Kyuyoh's monochrome masterpieces

The highly intricate ink flows that grace archaic clerical scripts and decorative art, the illuminated plates of medieval European manuscripts, may be aesthetically pleasing, but are essentially skillfully beautified elaborations of simplistic lettering.
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / ON: FASHION
Nov 8, 2011

Birthdays, debuts and memorials, all in the name of fashion

Cavalli makes first trip to Japan
Japan Times
MULTIMEDIA
Nov 3, 2011

Undressing the myth behind Goya

On first appraisal, it might seem that the organizers have brought the wrong Maja to Japan for the exhibition "Goya: Lights and Shadows" at Tokyo's National Museum of Western Art.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Oct 22, 2011

Briton aims to restore poets' peak to former glory

Nineteen university students and civic-minded Kyoto residents squat on a mountain pass on a cloudless afternoon in early October as a tall British poet, Stephen Gill, 58, reads from a collection of haiku.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Oct 16, 2011

The hills of Kotsubo hide the tombs of fallen samurai

No matter how warm and sunny the day, there's always a chill in Mandarado Yagura, a samurai graveyard in Kotsubo, right at the boundary between Kamakura and Zushi in Kanagawa Prefecture just south of Yokohama.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Sep 10, 2011

Swiss tries to bring foreign tourists back to Japan, a step at a time

The undulating sea observes the solitary walker. A triangular bamboo farmer's hat shades his face as the infinite horizon stretches ahead, marking out his path.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 9, 2011

Beating the midlife blues

Are you feeling down about middle age? Do you find yourself thinking that time is hurtling and you'll never reach your goals — or, perhaps more distressingly, that they don't even fit who you are anymore?
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Sep 4, 2011

Actress's inheritance saga plays out like melodrama

Sometimes the components of a news story fit together so perfectly that you can't help but wonder how much of it was engineered by the press. Actress Hisako Manda, a former beauty queen who found success in recent years as a cover girl for magazines catering to women in their 50s, is currently at the...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 2, 2011

Kyoko Kagawa retrospective looks back at Japan's golden age of cinema

Actress Kyoko Kagawa has starred in some of Japan's most successful films, over an impressive acting career that has spanned more than 60 years. She was the First Lady during the so-called golden age of the Japanese film industry in the 1950s and '60s, appearing in such classics as 1953's "Tokyo Monogatari...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / HOTELS & RESTAURANTS
Aug 26, 2011

Hokkaido fair at Keio's Tokyo hotels

Through Sept. 30, the Keio Plaza Hotel Tokyo is holding a Hokkaido food fair at its restaurants.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 22, 2011

Tyranny of the quest for shortcuts

It is said that Americans have a genius for simplification. Gradually, however, the quest for it has become a global trend, one that continues to conquer new territories, just as blue jeans once did.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 12, 2011

'The Tree of Life'

When "Days of Heaven" was finally released in 1978 (see last week's review) after two years of perfectionist fiddling in the editing room, director Terrence Malick was given a blank check by his patron at Paramount, industrialist Charles Bluhdorn, to develop his next project. Malick assembled a small...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Aug 7, 2011

Step back in time down Chofu way

The map of Japan is full of intriguing holes and fissures, provincial areas that are not perhaps terrae incognitae in the strictest sense, but are nevertheless puzzlingly overlooked by visitors. Preserved by neglect, they are often proximate to better-known locales that sap the will of visitors to press...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jul 17, 2011

Oblivion is a soldier's reward

Shigeru Mizuki's "Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths" begins with a gallery of the faces of each of the 30 main characters.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 15, 2011

'Peace'

Most serious documentaries made in Japan, especially for television, follow a basic just-the-facts format. A presenter or narrator and various talking heads explain and interpret what we are seeing, from beauty shots of tourist spots to footage grabbed on the run in a war zone. Meanwhile, in the background,...
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / STYLE WISE
Jun 14, 2011

A season for accolades, milestones and new frontiers

Florence and Kyoto unite to celebrate Gucci's 90 years Revered luxury brand Gucci is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year with a special traveling exhibition in Japan that highlights its prowess in craftsmanship. Starting at the famed Kinkaku-ji Golden Temple in Kyoto, "Gucci: 90 years" showcases...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
May 29, 2011

Japanese genius shines eclectic in its extravagant simplicities of style

"Live your era, surmount your era!" With these words, written in 1935, the young woodblock artist Yoshio Fujimaki gave out a cry for genius. Certainly his words apply to the genius of Bob Dylan (whose 70th birthday was celebrated on these pages last week), since both he, Fujimaki and others of genius...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 19, 2011

Art in the realm of the sense of smell

In the battle between sight and smell, sight usually comes out on top as the more valued sense. But while our visual sense supplies us with copious and precise information about the world around us and allows us to appreciate images of beauty, our olfactory sense often has a firmer grasp on our moods,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
May 19, 2011

Yoshida returns to dance with the BRB as it tours her homeland

Miyako Yoshida, who retired from The Royal Ballet last year after a 25-year career at the top of the ballet world, is now bringing the grace that she has become world-famous for home to her native Japan — as guest principal of the Birmingham Royal Ballet (BRB), which tours the country for the first...

Longform

Eme-Ima Kitchen is one of over 10,000 kodomo shokudō in Japan. A term first used in 2012 to describe makeshift eateries offering free or cheap meals to disadvantaged kids, it now refers to a diverse range of individuals, groups and organizations working to provide not only food but a sense of belonging to both children and adults.
Japan’s ‘children’s cafeterias’ are booming — but is that a good thing?