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CULTURE / Art
May 2, 2001

'Girly photographer' charts her own course

It is has been about a decade since the debut of the onnanoko shashinka, an immensely popular group of young Japanese female photographers whose work was largely characterized by simple subjects reflecting their everyday life, captured with a point-and-shoot aesthetic. Initially, the best known of the...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Apr 28, 2001

Clothes from heart shaping up for Golden Week

As dusk falls on an unseasonally cold and rainy Saturday, Michiyo Masago is bent over her computer. We meet at her atelier now because she is just returned from Yokohama, and tomorrow she flies to Okinawa -- direct to Ishigakijima, from where she will take a boat to Iriemote.
CULTURE / Art
Apr 18, 2001

A seductive city reveals its essence

One of the places where a little Vivaldi would make perfect background music is the exhibition "Venetian Paintings of the 18th Century," now at the Ueno Royal Museum.
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Apr 15, 2001

Yamato: Notes from the underground

Call it the B1 syndrome, if you will, or perhaps the bargain-basement phenomenon. But the sad truth is, you don't dine well at the bottom of a building.
CULTURE / Art
Apr 11, 2001

How Italy taught the world to see

In many ways, Renaissance artists taught us how to see.
LIFE / Food & Drink / THE WAY OF WASHOKU
Apr 8, 2001

Rice grains of wisdom

I spent five years cooking in fine dining restaurants in the U.S., and yet I was not quite prepared for life as an apprentice in a Japanese kitchen.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Mar 15, 2001

Let Tokyo Q be your guide

TOKYO 2001-2002: Annual Guide to the City, by the staff of Tokyo Q with Rick Kennedy. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2001, 160 pp., 130 b/w images, $9.95. Tokyo, the largest city in the world, cornucopia turned upside-down, has always required a guide book. Not only are there competing attractions,...
CULTURE / Art
Mar 11, 2001

Bottling everyday beauty on film

With an oeuvre more than a quarter-century in the making, Mamoru Sugiyama is due for a retrospective exhibition. So that is exactly what Tokyo's respected Photo Gallery International has given the 49-year-old photographer, in a show featuring some 30 of Sugiyama's representative black-and-white still-life...
CULTURE / Film
Mar 9, 2001

Dirty, rotten, brilliant scoundrel

Woody Allen's films tend to be best when he manages to get beyond himself, which isn't often these days. But if there's one thing Woody loves more than a part in which he lands a younger leading lady, it's jazz. "Sweet and Lowdown," Allen's latest film, is a semifictional paean to guitarist Emmet Ray,...
SOCCER / J. League
Mar 9, 2001

Show me what you've got!

I'd like to greet all the players in the J. League and look forward to seeing the joy of football in Japan this year. I'd specifically like to welcome the new foreign players. My message to you, as well as to the Japanese players, is simply play your best, play football.
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Mar 1, 2001

NHK's hollow take on easy-money bubble era

What's impressive about the new Steven Soderbergh film, "Traffic," which opens here in April, is how thoroughly it presents all the ramifications of America's drug war by exclusively dramatic means: no charts, no explanations of cause and effect, no polemics. The movie's three separate plot vectors intersect...
LIFE / Travel
Feb 28, 2001

Asia's heritage boom

Call it nostalgia or call it a self-awakening, but Asians are rediscovering the value of their architectural heritage. From ancient police courts in Shanxi, China to forest temples in Thailand, from colonial quays in Singapore to the brick kilns and iron smithies of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, the...
CULTURE / Books
Feb 20, 2001

More to it than meets the eye: the private world of 'manga'

ADULT MANGA: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society, by Sharon Kinsella. Curzon Press, 2000, 228 pp., $19.95 (paper). "Manga" leads a double life in Japan. Its popularity as entertainment for the masses is well-known: Subway riders furtively flip through its pages, young people crowd into...
CULTURE / Art
Feb 18, 2001

Renoir's transition to Old Master

Renoir's world is a chocolate box, full of plump women, sweet children and pastel whirls. But even if you prefer paintings with more bite, do not dismiss Bridgestone's new Renoir exhibition. This interesting selection reveals a talent of more depth and restlessness than you may have seen before.
COMMUNITY
Feb 11, 2001

The accidental ambassadors

Less than six months after bathing in the international attention that came with hosting the Olympic Games, Australians are celebrating their nation's 100th birthday.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 27, 2001

Corruption in China: business as usual?

Hardly a week goes by in China now without some leader being executed or arraigned for corruption. And the level of the officials being charged and convicted (much the same thing in China) is rising.
CULTURE / Art
Jan 14, 2001

Ensor, Delvaux span era of art

Skeletons in fancy dress fight over a corpse with brushes and mops. Women wearing nothing but pink bows and dreamy smiles trail through classic courtyards, while mountains crumble at their feet. "From Ensor to Delvaux," is a glimpse into the weird and wonderful world of 20th century Belgian art. The...
COMMUNITY
Dec 17, 2000

Naturalist issues guide to Tokyo wildlife

Kevin Short leads two quite distinct lives. In California, he is a husband and father, with a home, a dog and three cars. In Japan -- based in Chiba -- he is a natural history writer and environmental consultant, involved with fieldwork, writing, botanical illustration and lectures, and leading secret...
CULTURE / Art
Dec 9, 2000

Nishiki-e outshine Chinese prints

"The Birth of Nishiki-e," the current exhibition at the Ota Memorial Museum of Art, claims to be an attempt to explore Chinese influence on ukiyo-e, Japanese print art.
CULTURE / Art
Dec 2, 2000

Treasures of ancient China

Until the 16th century, when the first Europeans reached these shores, China had, for over 1,000 years, been the sole foreign influence on the development of Japanese culture. Some of this influence had been refracted through Korea, but Korea itself was in a position similar to Japan's: a recipient of...
LIFE / Travel
Nov 15, 2000

Russia's Baltic outpost

Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin was not one of Russian history's shining stars. An unpleasant figure, he found favor with dictator Josef Stalin and rose to become Soviet president before dying in 1946. Nonetheless, in the fashion of those times, his surname was given to two major Russian cities and their accompanying...
CULTURE / Art / CERAMIC SCENE
Nov 11, 2000

Bringing a new shine to old Kutani

When I first looked at the work of Yasokichi Tokuda III (b. 1933) I had to put on a pair of sunglasses -- I was almost blinded by the intensity of his kaleidoscopic Kutani porcelain.
CULTURE / Art
Nov 11, 2000

Capturing private moments of a gritty London

"Point and Shoot" -- an exhibition of gritty black-and-white photographs of nothing in particular, the work of the inimitable Henry Bond and his shots of the streets, people and places of London -- his home -- is now on show at the Taro Nasu Gallery.
CULTURE / Art
Oct 22, 2000

Holding art and utility in our hands

Amid the sensationalism of much contemporary art, it is refreshing to sense honest artistry in metal, clay and wood. "Thoughts on Contemporary Vessels" at the Crafts Gallery of the National Museum of Modern Art is an exhibition centered on the humble cup, bowl or jar. And it reveals crafts that are as...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Oct 15, 2000

Roll out the mauve carpet and put the sake on ice

When I heard that the ambassador of Haiti and a voodoo priest would be visiting my house, I rushed around in a flurry to get things ready. After all, how often do you have an ambassador and a voodoo priest in your house at the same time?
CULTURE / Music
Oct 14, 2000

King's not dead, long live Crimson

Robert Fripp is rock 'n' roll's quintessential English eccentric. Not in a flamboyant, over-the-top way like the late Vivian Stanshall or Keith Moon, but in an offbeat, understated manner -- like a country vicar whose avocation is the study of reptile eggs or quill pens. Fripp's quirky, yet iron-willed...
COMMUNITY
Oct 11, 2000

A perfect picture of a garden in Shimane

The Adachi Museum and its Japanese garden in Shimane Prefecture, part of the beautiful San'in district in western Honshu, is near historic Matsue with its castle and the home of writer Lafcadio Hearn.
COMMUNITY
Sep 28, 2000

Birth of a new generation

Turn on the television or flip through any popular magazine, and you're sure to come across gyarumama (gal mamas) -- teenage moms with tanned skin, trendy clothes and towering platform shoes.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Sep 15, 2000

Ever-unfashionable Akutagawa

JAPANESE SHORT STORIES, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, translated by Takashi Kojima, foreword by John McVittie. Singapore: Tuttle Publishing, 1981, 240 pp. with 15 illustrations, $14.95. THE ESSENTIAL AKUTAGAWA, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, edited by Seiji Lippit, foreword by Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Marsililio...
ENVIRONMENT
Sep 14, 2000

Fisheries crashing from pollution in Ariake

The cuisine of the Ariake Sea in northern Kyushu, featured recently in quarterly cultural magazine Fukuoka Style, is a strange one. It's dominated by grotesque, unusual-tasting fish and shellfish simmered heavily in sugar and soy or wrapped in dense layers of seaweed.

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