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Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 19, 2004

Surreal adventures of the image kind

The current special exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art deftly achieves two goals dear to public institutions everywhere: it educates the public -- and does so on a shoestring budget.
Japan Times
Features
May 9, 2004

Bridging cultures with books

Whether their parents read them fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, or even encouraged them to explore Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, most Japanese have been exposed to overseas literature from an early age, and many go on to discover the likes of Tolkien, L.M. Montgomery, Michael...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Mar 14, 2004

Japanese erotica exposed

FORBIDDEN IMAGES: Erotic Art from Japan's Edo Period, by Monta Kayakawa, (Trilingual: Finnish, Swedish, English). Helsinki: City Art Museum, 2003, 112 pp., 82 color plates, 3,800 yen (cloth). Japanese shunga -- erotic paintings and prints, some of the world's most beautiful -- remain indigenously unknown....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 11, 2004

Back to Futurists and fascists

Max Rating: * * * * 1/2 (out of 5) Japanese title: Adolf no Gashu Director: Menno Meyjes Running time: 108 minutes Language: English Currently showing [See Japan Times movie listings] With his debut feature, "Max," director Menno Meyjes takes us back to the Germany of 1918, in the immediate...
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Jan 23, 2004

Matsushita chief resolves to achieve profit target before stepping down

OSAKA (Kyodo) Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. President Kunio Nakamura said Thursday that the Matsushita group will raise its targeted ratio of operating profit to sales to 5 percent under his leadership and achieve that goal.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / CERAMIC SCENE
Jan 14, 2004

New year musing of a 'pottery poet'

As this is the first Ceramic Scene of 2004, I'd like to wish all readers a Happy and Healthy New Year!
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Oct 29, 2003

250 reasons to be happy, then some

I'm happy! The reason I'm happy is I love art, and this month a total of four -- yes four -- new contemporary art spaces opened in Tokyo.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Aug 24, 2003

Slowly does it

Great works of art take time.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jun 4, 2003

Is obscenity in the eye of the public?

In November 1994, Takashi Asai -- president of Uplink, a movie distribution and publishing house -- published a Japanese edition of "Mapplethorpe," a collection of 260 black-and-white photographs by the U.S. photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who died in 1989 of AIDS.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Apr 16, 2003

Into psychic free-fall

We're so used to Tokyo's cramped streets that the endless parallel perspectives offered by the spacious grid of roads in central Ginza can make the head spin. And recently, they've become more dizzying still. Hanging from every lamppost along Chuo-dori is an eye-catching image: A young woman, her scarf...
JAPAN
Jan 31, 2003

Standing by policies remains elusive ideal

It was a humiliating blow for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Jan 15, 2003

MoT showcases artists who draw deeply from real life

"Art," wrote the French artist Robert Filliou (1926-87), "is what makes life more interesting than art." And this, dear reader, is just about my favorite quote. Profoundly mystifying, it serves as an M.C. Escher-esque comeback when the old "What is art?" line is thrown out less as a question than as...
CULTURE / Music
Nov 17, 2002

Cozy up to the 'new' classical

Classical music fans frequently complain that avant-garde music made after Schonberg hasn't resonated with listeners and that composers create tunes for their own satisfaction, without audiences in mind.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Oct 30, 2002

Afloat but not adrift on the sea of dreams

As the fall exhibition season moves into high gear, there are a number of good shows going up at Tokyo's leading contemporary art galleries, and what is notable is that a fair number of them are based on well-defined themes.
BUSINESS
Sep 19, 2002

Full time oft tough balancing act

For three young women, working as temps matches both their career plans and their private lives.
Japan Times
JAPAN / MUSEUM MUSINGS
Sep 7, 2002

Inax Gallery enables mundane items to assume new, artistic dimensions

Free your mind and take a look around. Inax Gallery reminds visitors that everything that exists in this world -- even something that would be unlikely to ordinarily attract attention -- has an interesting story to tell.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 14, 2002

Felicien Rops: Days of madness

The catalog of the Felicien Rops exhibition is wrapped in the anonymous brown paper more often used to disguise pornography than art. The display itself, now at the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, would, if art galleries issued such things, come with a parental advisory label. With a preponderance...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Aug 8, 2002

Cities waging a new kind of bidding war

With Japan's public works projects having long been tainted by bid-rigging and bribery, the city of Yokosuka in Kanagawa Prefecture is taking an aggressive approach toward curbing such corruption.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 7, 2002

Artists of the Sun King eclipsed

Even as art galleries and museums around the world contend with falling visitor numbers, stepping inside a Japanese museum can feel more like braving Mitsukoshi on the first day of the summer sales.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Jul 31, 2002

Man vs. nature: the frontline

Blockbuster solo shows now running at the Bunkamura (Rene Magritte) and the Setagaya Art Museum (Joan Miro) are already ensuring this is one of Tokyo's best summers in years for aficionados of 20th-century art. Now, thanks to a bit of bold curating by Taro Amano, the Yokohama Museum of Art is host to...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jul 24, 2002

Evoking the mystery of the world

René Magritte's mustache, torso attached plunders a wet hat. "Negative Scenery" (1992) by Shozo Torii
JAPAN
Jul 23, 2002

Nature restoration NPOs also work to create jobs

A few nonprofit organizations are attempting to restore nature around the nation's lakes and mountains.
JAPAN
Jul 18, 2002

Report is vague on political donations

The amount of money that firms winning public works projects can contribute to politicians should be limited, an LDP advisory panel's final report recommended Wednesday.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / CERAMIC SCENE
Jun 26, 2002

Bringing the tabletop into the gallery

On the cover of the catalog for an exhibition now at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo is -- ready for this? -- a shoyusashi (soy-sauce bottle). I find that quite odd, as the museum houses the hallowed arts of painting, sculpture and the like. A shoyusashi? Come on now, it just doesn't seem...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
May 29, 2002

The naked truth about (male) beauty

I'm thinking, as I write this, about beauty. I'm thinking about beauty because I'm flying over Siberia, and below me there is an expanse of softly sculpted white. I'm thinking about beauty because I'm returning from Paris, where I spent the last few days -- ostensibly on a writing assignment, but mostly...
Japan Times
JAPAN / MUSEUM MUSINGS
Apr 27, 2002

Craftsmen keep alive hair ornaments that were all the rage in Edo Period

The display of fine Japanese hair ornaments at Tsumami-Kanzashi Museum in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward illustrates a small world of plums, cherry blossoms, chrysanthemums, chestnuts, bees and phoenixes created with pieces of colorful silk.
JAPAN / MUSEUM MUSINGS
Apr 20, 2002

Museum in Ikebukuro holds Mideast treasures

Rather like a Pharaoh's tomb inside one of the Great Pyramids, one dark corner of Sunshine City -- a large commercial complex near JR Ikebukuro Station in Tokyo -- is filled with ancient treasures.
COMMENTARY
Mar 26, 2002

Getting tough on bid rigging

Japanese newspapers are awash with scandals over bidding for public works projects. Japan's construction industry, which accounts for more than 10 percent of the nation's employed workers, is the world's largest. It is unconscionable that this important industry has become a hotbed of collusion among...

Longform

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