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Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 6, 2012

'Perfect Sense'

Will the world end with a whimper or a bang? That may well depend on whether you're at the multiplex or the art house. While blockbusters continue to relish the visual bombastics of Armageddon (the most wanton example being "2012"), a number of smaller films are also delving into the dark dramatic potential...
BUSINESS / JAPANESE PERSPECTIVES
Dec 26, 2011

Brace for the year of the dragon, when all shall be revealed

In the Sino-Japanese cycle of annual zodiac signs, the year 2012 will be the year of the dragon. 2011 was the year of the hare. How quickly it is jumping away.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 23, 2011

Disaster not the only reason for Japan's sluggish 2011 box office

After several years of boom, Japanese films finally had a bust in 2011. Although official overall figures have not been released, domestic box-office leader Toho has announced that total revenues from its titles will be down about 20 percent this year compared with 2010. The industry as a whole will...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 23, 2011

'Restless'

Gus Van Sant's "Restless" is a film about love, an ode to doomed but pure teenage infatuation. But it's also about love of a film, in this case Hal Ashby's cult classic "Harold and Maude." It's one of those cases where the lift (or "homage") is so overt and massive that it's hard to consider "Restless"...
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / TECH_JAPAN
Dec 21, 2011

2011: The year when Japan went global over social networking

Over the past year, major U.S. social-media services have made some serious inroads into Japan. Here are some recent developments.
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
Dec 18, 2011

Film promotes Japan energy revolution

The known world has already been through three pivotal epochs: the agricultural, industrial and information-technology revolutions. Now, a fourth is taking place: the renewable-energy revolution.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Nov 18, 2011

'George Harrison: Living in the Material World' / 'Under Control'

Director Martin Scorsese was one of the first to score big with the rockumentary format with his 1978 film "The Last Waltz," which covered the farewell concert by The Band and their musician friends such as Neil Young and Van Morrison. He's kept a hand in it ever since, making boomer rock docs on Bob...
BASEBALL / BASEBALL BULLET-IN
Nov 13, 2011

PL champion Hawks are vital part of vibrant Fukuoka

While I was flying from Tokyo's Haneda Airport to Fukuoka for the Pacific League Climax Series final stage last week, a thought occurred to me. What if the Wright Brothers could come back and take a similar flight today? What would they think of the advances made in aviation since they made that...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Nov 11, 2011

'Contagion' / 'Moneyball'

Cinema imagines the apocalypse on a regular basis, touching on everything from Mayan calendar-related polar shifts to the ever-popular walking dead. Few films, however, dare to deal with scenarios that could actually happen; that's what makes Steven Soderbergh's "Contagion," which looks at a deadly global...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Nov 11, 2011

An audience with Kyoko Kagawa

Kyoko Kagawa is among the fast dwindling number of living witnesses to Japanese cinema's Golden Age of the 1950s and '60s.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Nov 4, 2011

'Free Wheels East'

If you were a strapping, handsome, able-bodied youth just out of university, what would be your next step? Back in the late 20th century, young men chose professions such as investment banking or financial consultation, and diligently went about getting their MBAs. Remember those days of multiple degrees...
CULTURE / Film
Nov 4, 2011

Tokyo film fest shuns controversy

The 24th edition of the Tokyo International Film Festival ended on Sunday, after nine days and 128 films, without any major mishaps or controversies. This was a disappointment to one journalist friend: "A good film festival invites controversy," she told me at the closing party. "TIFF hates it."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Oct 28, 2011

'Sumagura (Smuggler)'

Katsuhito Ishii was an early avatar of Japanese quirk, making films that celebrated the wilder, goofier side of the local pop culture while flouting the conventions of commercial cinema, including at least a veneer of sanity.
Japan Times
MULTIMEDIA
Oct 27, 2011

Playful imagery born out of Berlin's ruins

Berlin is a place that artists want to be. It attracts them from all over the globe — Poland, Korea, Albania and Singapore, to name but a few of the countries represented in this exhibition. They go there to seek connections, collaborations, networks, education, mentoring — and cheap rent.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / LIGHT GIST
Oct 25, 2011

The ridiculously frightening world of Japanese spooks

Halloween is that time of the year when the occult, macabre and humorous come together to create a festival of fear and fun for all the family. A celebration of death and demons with its roots in pre-Christian Europe, the summer's-end spook-fest has morphed over the centuries into a highly commercialized...
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Oct 24, 2011

Foreign films' Japanese titles often read like riddles

Japanese distributors of foreign films usually follow the path of least resistance in titling their products for the local market, either rendering the title in katakana or translating it more or less directly. One recently released example is the shocker "The Last Exorcism," whose katakana-ized Japanese...
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / STYLE WISE
Oct 18, 2011

Fashion Week action happening on more than just runways

Tokyo's MBFW festivities It's mid-Mercedes Benz Fashion Week Tokyo (MBFW Tokyo) and there's still an array of snazzy events to carry you through to the end while keeping you fashionable. So roll up your best, pressed sleeves and read on.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Oct 7, 2011

'Rise of the Planet of the Apes'

The original "Planet of the Apes" movie of 1968, based on the science-fantasy novel by Pierre Boulle, dropped a couple of astronauts onto an unknown planet where evolution had worked out backwards: Humans were feral and hunted by the ruling species, monkeys. It was only the film's killer reveal at the...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 30, 2011

'Hayabusa'

When Hayabusa, a Japanese satellite sent to collect soil samples from a distant asteroid, returned safely to Earth in June 2010, many Japanese felt an excitement and pride more akin to a World Cup win than an event that, abroad, was a one-day news story to all but space geeks.
Reader Mail
Sep 25, 2011

Hollywood: place of liberation

Roger Pulvers has written two recent Counterpoint columns on Hollywood's "racial barrier" (Aug. 28, "Fame may be fleeting, but warm memories of Miyoshi Umeki live on," and Sept. 18, "Mako: the Japanese-American actor who fought racist stereotypes").
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 23, 2011

In a galaxy not so far away....

"Japanese space engineers could just possibly be the most boring people on the face of the Earth," laughed an aeronautics engineer working for JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), during a brief interview with The Japan Times.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 14, 2011

More than a little help from Gadhafi's Western friends

With Col. Moammar Gadhafi's regime in ruins and Gadhafi himself on the run, it is time to ponder just how he survived in power for so long. Greed for markets and money, it seems, often trumped the West's supposed concern for basic human rights.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Sep 8, 2011

Japan and America share their acting skills

Next year will mark the New York premiere performances of a new collaborative project whose organizers hope will spur a revolution in the film and theater industries of Japan.
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
CULTURE / Film
Aug 26, 2011

Life from a global perspective, and into the past

It may not be a cinematic masterpiece, but "Life in a Day" is a prophetic example of where film may be headed. Everything that has surrounded and defined the film industry — studios, locations, directors, casts and theaters — all of these are condensed into two letters: PC. Flip open a laptop and...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 19, 2011

Pitt, Penn heap praise on Malick's 'real world'

Terrence Malick kicks off his new film, "The Tree of Life," with a bang. The Big Bang, actually. Over the next 138 minutes, the viewer witnesses a journey through history that ends up in a small town in Texas. Critics seem to agree that you'll either love it or hate it.
JAPAN / History
Aug 14, 2011

Film mines rich seams of history

Hiroko Kumagai will never forget the day in 1998 when she first stepped inside the red-brick building at the entrance to the closed and shuttered Miyahara shaft in the Miike coal mine in Omuta, Fukuoka Prefecture.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 22, 2011

Very different approaches to the struggling hero theme

James Gunn wrote the screenplay for 2000's "The Specials," a low-budget indie comedy that mocked superheroes, showing them kicking back, whining about their action figure deals or bloviating about their origin stories, but never once engaging in actual crime-fighting.

Longform

A man offers prayers at Hebikubo Shrine in Tokyo's Shinagawa Ward. The shrine is one of several across the country dedicated to the snake.
Shed your skin and reinvent yourself in the Year of the Snake