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Banzai To Japanese Print Media! Kaori Shoji’s Picks For Excellence In Japan’s...
As Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” would say with a sigh and drag on her cigarette holder, “Quelle year.” As far as bad years go, 2017 pretty much did us in and it’s not even over yet....
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6 murderers are paroled in a small Japanese town. Will they bring the place...
Rural depopulation is a serious problem in Japan, so much that for the past decade, media fiction has devoted an entire genre into telling its stories. Bankrupt shops with their shutters permanently...
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Shonen: How A Young Japanese Gigolo Learns To Love Life Via Hard Work (film...
You’ve heard that foodie movies trigger your appetite. Love stories trigger tear ducts. Documentaries will cause political rants. In that vein, “Shonen,” a film about a male prostitute pleasuring his...
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“The Only Woman in the Room”/ How The Amazing Beate Wrote Equal Rights For...
Unanswerable questions of the year: Is Japan really going to war? Is Japan’s peacetime constitution going to be trashed by the ruling party and returned back to the Imperial Constitution, which did not...
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Oh Lucy! A darkly funny movie that asks: Can learning English in Japan change...
Shinobu Terashima is one of the few Japanese actresses who plays hardball, consistently choosing roles that blow holes in the cardboard stereotype of the Japanese woman. We all know this woman:...
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“Yo girls, get out of the ring!”–Sumo, Sexism And Why In Japan Upholding...
Ever since the #Me Too movement landed in Japan late last year, there’s been a greater awareness of women’s rights and sexual harassment. In Tokyo subways cars, there’s a video ad exhorting female...
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Larceny Is Part of Family Love in Cannes Winner “Shoplifters”
The titular family in “Shoplifters” give a new slant to the term “living in squalor.” Their house looks more like a bizarre crime scene than an actual dwelling for normal people but – and this is a...
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Nazis, Goebels, His Secretary and Nippon. An Austrian Documentary Reminds Us...
She’s old, really old. You could describe her as an ancient relic. But at 103 years old, Brunhilde Pomsel seems strong, confident, even blase. Pomsel is the centerpiece of the stunning documentary, A...
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Child Abuse In Japan. Why Japan Keeps Returning Abused Kids To Their Parents...
What causes a 5-year old girl to write in her notebook, “Please forgive me,” just a few days prior to her death from abuse? “Please forgive me” is ‘onegai, yurushite,’ in Japanese, and the phrase made...
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New Movie “The Trial” (審判）Shows The Kafkaesque Side Of Japan’s Often...
If you are unlucky enough to be indicted for a crime in Japan, you’ll find that the system actually works on the presumption that you are guilty until proven guilty. The conviction rate is 99%. If...
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Marry Early or Marry Late or Remain “The Honorable Single”? You can pursue...
Just in case you didn’t get the memo, Japan has a pretty terrible track record when it comes to love and relationships. People are marrying late or not at all and by 2040, half of Japan’s households...
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We’re Stuck With ‘The Last Samurai’ While Everyone Else Gets Crazy Rich
by Kaori Shoji In high school, the girls around me had one wish–to have a different nationality, preferably American, and to trash our drab school uniforms for the outfits in “Beverly Hills 90210.”...
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Why the Japanese Media Would Rather Not Talk About Brett Kavanaugh
By Kaori Shoji The Japanese media has been eerily calm about the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, or if you want the truth, ‘downright reticent’ is more like it. Kavanaugh’s confirmation as Supreme Court...
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The Eternal Outsider :Ten Years Black in Japan–a book review
by Kaori Shoji Trevor David Houchen was an expat in Nagoya for about 8 years before getting divorced from his Japanese wife. He tried to get joint custody of his two young children but was defeated in...
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“Hey you grubby kids, get off my fashion runway!” Minami Aoyama Vs The Ruffians
by Kaori Shoji Who would have thought a plot of land in a Tokyo neighborhood could cause such a ruckus? The construction of a Child Consultation Center (Jidousoudansho 児童相談所) in prestigious Minami...
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Japan Ten Years From Now. The Truth May Sort Of Awful But The Movie Is Great
by Kaori Shoji We’re nearing the end of the world but there’s a sliver of a chance that we may be able to go out in style. That pretty much sums up the message behind “Ten Years Japan (十年)” part of a...
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The Way of the Sword Requires a Ton of Sacrifice/ZAN movie review
by Kaori Shoji You don’t know cool until you’ve seen ZAN (international title: “Killing”). A period action film set in the late Edo Period, ZAN is everything that The Last Samurai is not: minimalist,...
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Japanese magazine fucks up by posting ranking of “f*ckable female college...
by Kaori Shoji Some men in Japan just don’t seem to get that objectifying women is wrong. In the land of the rising sun, the objectification of women is not only a thing, it’s a solid tradition and...
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Too Little, Too Late? Porn Mags Set to Disappear From Convenience Stores–And...
by Kaori Shoji In Japan, the convenience store “baito” or part time job, is a rite of passage. Teenagers work at their neighborhood ‘conbini’ after school as a way of padding their allowances and...
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The high price of cocaine in Japan (metaphorically & literally)
by Kaori Shoji The March 12 arrest of Pierre Taki (real name: Masanori Taki) for possession and usage of cocaine sent shock waves through the Japanese media. Now that April and the new Reiwa era has...
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