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A Case For Making Japanese Art Weird Again
New Dimensions: Expanded Consciousness (May 23 through June 15) is the latest exhibition at the Mikke Gallery in Yotsuya, Tokyo. It proffers a window onto the increasingly intrusive, yet intriguing,...
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BABU Skateboards and Makes Art But You Can’t See His Face
Feature photo ©︎Shu Nakagawa BABU is a street artist based in Kitakyushu City, Fukuoka. He skateboards in the post-earthquake disaster areas like Fukushima and Noto Peninsula. He makes art from found...
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Art and DEI Get Cozy at the agnès b. Gallery in Aoyama”
These are weird times when everyday, the news brings yet another series of incredulous, synapse-shredding headlines. One can’t be so naive as to believe that art will step in and save the world. Yet,...
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Going Gently Into That Good Night May Not Be So Bad
‘Teki’ means enemy. The 77-year old protagonist Gisuke Watanabe in Teki Cometh (Japanese title: Teki) can’t quite figure out the exact identity of that enemy but he’s aware it’s coming to destroy...
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Performing Kaoru’s Funeral
The Story of the Woman Who Scripted Her Own Funeral by Kaori Shoji Noriko Yuasa strikes you as the kind of person who locks eyes with every bull that dares cross her path, grabs it by the horns, and...
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The Race To Run Tokyo: Who’s going to be the next governor of the megapolis?
by Kaori Shoji What a grab bag. Or perhaps more fitting; a snake pit? The Tokyo gubernatorial elections are slated for this Sunday and we have just a day to sift through the whopping 56 candidates, by...
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In Ichigatsuno Koeni Yorokobiwo Kizame (International title: Voice), a young woman named Reiko (Atsuko Maeda) professes to her boyfriend-for-hire that she had been sexually abused as a child. Reiko...
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Boy Idols And Dostoevsky Come Together in Bad Lands
Bad Lands is the latest film release from Masato Harada who at this point, is Japan’s most exciting filmmaker. Forget the foreign critics’ darling Ryusuke Hamaguchi of Drive My Car fame – Harada is...
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What This Means (a short-story about love and marriage in Japan during the...
by Kaori Shoji credit: Kaori Shoji Rikako, my wife, was staying with her best friend from university, the one that hung around her all these years and never got married. She was pretty attractive too,...
View ArticleAn Honest Portrait of a Japanese B*tch
Japanese women are angry. If you didn’t already know this you probably shouldn’t be reading a review of The Ripple because you won’t be interested in a film about older, enraged Japanese women....
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The Unbearable Pathos Of Poop (Okiku’s World film review)
by Kaori Shoji Poop is the main thing that remains in the mind after watching Okiku And The World. Lots and lots of poop. Ninety-nine percent of the film was shot in black and white which alleviates...
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Japan Goes Up in Smoke
I hail from a family of smokers. My parents, their siblings, my cousins, my grandparents. New Years’ family get-togethers were marked by cramped living rooms dense with smoke, full ashtrays waiting to...
View ArticleEgoism and Love: Not mutually exclusive
Egoist. The title seemingly belies this love story. From the vantage point of today’s incessantly narcissistic and increasingly toxic dating/relationship culture, Egoist is the exact opposite of what...
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Samurai play soccer and other fairy tales: Japan and the world cup
by Kaori Shoji When the professional soccer league of Japan aka ‘J-League’ officially came into existence in 1993 it was a huge deal. Suddenly, everyone was talking about rules and bandying about...
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“A Man” Takes Imposter Syndrome To New Dimensions
by Kaori Shoji Three minutes into A Man, you already know that Rie (Sakura Ando), who is minding her mother’s stationery shop in rural Miyazaki prefecture, will be dating the guy (Masataka Kubota) who...
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Washoku
by Kaori Shoji Back in May when we had lunch, my sister Rinko – who is eight years older than me – fessed up about a guy in her life. “He’s working in the washoku diner around the corner,” she said....
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Intimate Strangers: Mothers Without Sons—new suspense film explores the...
By Kaori Shoji In Intimate Stranger a razor blade – the old fashioned kind that you see barbers wielding in movies, with an open blade that folds into a scabbard – makes a frequent appearance. So...
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A Farewell To Japan’s King of Toxic Masculinity: Shintaro Ishihara
by Kaori Shoji At least it wasn’t a long, protracted goodbye. Ishihara would have hated that. On February 1st, Shintaro Ishihara, long-time ex-governor of Tokyo and former Minister of Transportation...
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Driving In Winter With Haruki Murakami… and Why We Still Need Him
by Kaori Shoji Drive My Car which opened last August 2021, was one of the best things to hit Japanese theaters in years. Yet many Japanese cinephiles or people who footed it to theaters in spite of...
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My Brushes With the Yakuza – Reflections of Life in Akasaka, Tokyo
My first encounter with the ‘yakuza’ or the crooks and gangsters of Japan’s underworld, happened when I was 14 years old, on my way home from cram school. It was around 10 PM and having no friends who...
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