For better or for worse, some of contemporary Japan's most recognizable cultural products come from the ever-ebullient world of pop culture. If this country's heroes in the 1950s and '60s were such intellectuals as film director Akira Kurosawa and author Yukio Mishima, today Japan's ...
PYONGYANG ARCHITECTURAL AND CULTURAL GUIDE, by Philipp Meuser. DOM publishers, 2012, 368 pp., $49.95 (paperback) Imagine an easy-to-navigate, pedestrian- and car-friendly city with enough space to avoid the kind of congestion that typically threatens to choke similar places worldwide — a city whose carefully thought-out ...
My editor at The Japan Times has a very simple policy when hunting for cheese in Tokyo: He checks the label and if it was made in Japan (excepting Hokkaido), he puts it straight back down. To my editor I am now happy to ...
Johannes Vermeer, one of the best known artists from the Dutch Golden Age, appears particularly popular in Japan. Once in a while, one or two of his works show up in Tokyo galleries and are used as bait to attract fans to otherwise dull ...
Much fanfare greeted the arrival at Narita in September 2010 of the first Burmese refugees to take advantage of Japan's decision to join the U.N.'s third-country resettlement program. Japan was the first Asian country to join the program, it was emphasized, under which the ...
For many years people have been acquainted with the word "refugee." Though it usually brings to mind wars, genocide and ethnic cleansing, more and more often it has been linked to climate change and natural disasters. We may now be entering the age of ...
OTAKU SPACES, by Patrick W. Galbraith. Chin Music Press, 2012, 240 pp., $20.00 (paperback) T he word otaku and the complex mass of ideas, people and trends variously connected to its constantly evolving meaning have been discussed and analyzed ad nauseam since this term ...
The Japanese entertainment world is supposed to be a very hard one to crack for foreigners in these lean years of economic doldrums. Once in a while a few people manage to carve out a niche for themselves through a combination of talent, perseverance ...
With his perfectly suntanned bald head and carefully trimmed white mustache, Shunpei Kanbe may remind some people of a lion tamer, or maybe an explorer from the Belle Epoque. Actually both of these guesses are not that far from the truth, as the 66-year-old Japanese ...
THE MONSTER MOVIE FAN'S GUIDE TO JAPAN, by Armand Vaquer. ComiXpress.com, 2010, 48 pp., $15.00 (softcover) Last year was the 100th anniversary of director Ishiro Honda's birth, but most of the English-language press in Japan didn't seem to notice. Granted, Honda may not be on ...
