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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Fiction: A Vital Occupation

It’s 7am. I’m not supposed to wake up till at least 9:30, but as long as I keep the curtains closed, I’ll be okay. Outside my apartmen...

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