Home / Archive for 2009

Inky Fingers and Ancient Pots: How Japan Helped Put the Finger on Foreigners

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Entering Japan has always been synonymous with fingerprinting, especially for those of us who came here several years ago. It is highly ir...
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Book Review: "Urayasu Tekkin Kazuko" by Kenji Hamaoka

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Japan gets a lot of praise around the World for its manga, but the stark truth is that most of this is turgid drivel. You know the sort of ...
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Sympathy for the Devil

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In this age of cheap sentimentality and easy excuses, everything has its apologists, defenders, and even fans. I’ve heard crows and na...
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Exhibition: Yukio Fujimoto

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What do you do when you love playing with sound, but you're not quite good enough to be a professional musician? The answer is simple ...
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Exhibition: Shinto Gods and Buddhist Deities

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One aspect of the Orient that Occidentals often find baffling is the ability of most Orientals to believe in several gods and religions at...
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Exhibition: Hiroshi Sugimoto

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Photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto made his name photographing stuffed animals and waxworks. OK, this sounds like a dumb thing to do, but th...
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Koga's Travels in Hyper-Reality

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Innocent Moonlit Night, 1929 One of my favorite clichés about art is the one that says great art comes from great suffering, somethin...
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Designed to dazzle: a lacquerware celebration

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The quintessential Japanese aesthetic is that of wabi sabi, a beauty associated with things that are simple, rustic, unpolished or even pla...
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Kennin-ji: Zen and the Roundabout Road to Enlightenment

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Tawaraya Sotatsu's Wind God and Thunder God In his classic book Yen in the Art of Archery , Eugen Herrigel makes it clear that trying...
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Exhibition: Tomatsu Shomei

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No doubt, you're all familiar with the monochrome look of early 60s Japan that is rolled out with TV clips or magazine photos every time...
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Narashige Koide: Excelling in a formerly alien medium

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White rappers used to be a joke until a credible one - Eminem - came along. In a similar way, Japanese artists' early efforts to master...
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Simple Tea, the Soul Soother

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Japan, a hectic, densely-populated country, has always been guilty of overloading the senses. It is only natural that here too an ameliora...
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Touching Base: living with the US military presence in Japan

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The reaction to the recent sinking of a Japanese fishery training vessel by a U.S. nuclear submarine off Hawaii, and the captain's ...
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Master at the cutting edge of art: The heritage of Japan's greatest swordsmith, Masamune

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Japan is often seen as a blend of the advanced and the archaic. But this combination is nothing new, as a visit to an exhibition of swords ...
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The Ballad of John & 'Yono'

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28 years after he was gunned down outside his New York apartment block, John Lennon is still with us. Here in Japan, he is with us even mor...
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Hello Clitty: "Toys ‘Arse’ Us" Japanese style!

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Perhaps due to other deficiencies, sex toys play a disproportionately large role in the erotic life of the Japanese. From the " An...
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Katsura Funakoshi: Going with the Grain

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In our modern, high–tech age of synthetic materials and digital information, there is something very reassuring about wood with its dull...
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Pinpricks in the Darkness: The Beautiful and Disturbing art of Fuyuko Matsui

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Art, despite all its complexities and convolutions, is and always has been simply a mirror of humanity. While one artist expresses hope, a...
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