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

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

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

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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Interview: Satoru Watanabe

Few of us can understand why the Taleban in Afghanistan are destroying the awe-inspiring giant Buddhist statues at Bamiyan instead of...

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Exhibition: Yukio Fujimoto

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

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

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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Exhibition: Iwami Furusawa

The Awakening, 1968 We've been hearing all the hype about the new Roppongi Art Triangle. What a load of b*ll*cks! While the ...

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Koga's Travels in Hyper-Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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Issey Miyake Profile

Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Issey Miyake, Mao Zedong - spot the odd one out. "Easy," you might think, but actually there’s no odd one o...

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Interview: Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama is perhaps Japan's most famous living artist. From her groundbreaking work in New York in the 1950s and 60s, when she e...

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Master at the cutting edge of art: The heritage of Japan's greatest swordsmith, Masamune

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'

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!

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

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

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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