 Japan Interviews
Regge Life | Simon Humphries | Joan Sinclair | David Mitchell | Ebizo Ichikawa XI | Chopstick Tattoo | John Foster | Barbara Flatten | Usagi | Kenichi Iwamoto | Ransui | Buraku Liberation League | James Heisig | Peter Sharpe | Wakako Harada | Animal Friends Niigata
Regge Life's film Doubles: Japan and America's Intercultural Children was screened at the Kansai International Film Festival.
Regge Life is an award-winner director: four CINE Golden Eagles, a Sony Innovator
of 1991, and he has been nominated for a Daytime Emmy for work on Sesame
Street.
Regge Life is in addition the founder and director of the Global Film
Network.
C. Ogawa
Simon
Humphries has been in Japan a long time, since 1988, and has worked
as a designer for Sony as well as Toyota. What makes him a bit special
is the fact that he's the only Western regular employee at Toyota's
headquarters in Toyota-shi near Nagoya, out of some 700 designers there.
And
while he is quick to downplay this uniqueness, he's not been afraid
to capitalise on it, to the benefit of both himself and Toyota.
Now
in his lateish 30s, he is currently responsible for Design Strategy
for both the Toyota and Lexus brands.
Richard Donovan
Pink Box - an interview with author Joan Sinclair
Read an interview with Joan Sinclair, author and photographer of Pink Box. Joan Sinclair feminist, journalist, lawyer, photographer, and former English teacher talks about her work on Japan's ubiquitous sex industry, Pink Box: Inside Japan's Sex Clubs.
In Japan the archetypes for sex clubs come from manga; the aesthetics
are similar to manga, the heroes reflect adult manga. These kinds of
clubs in a way adhere to cultural norms, but they are more a sanctioned
playground where men can be boys, can break the rules while still sticking
within the norms of Japanese society.
Booker Prize-nominated author David Mitchell moved to Hiroshima in his mid-twenties, where he decided to get serious about his career as an author.
Not surprisingly, Japan has had a profound impact on his work, and
his first two novels - Ghostwritten (1999) and Number 9 Dream (2001)
- feature a deluded cult member hiding in Okinawa, a juvenile jazz-buff
finding romance in Tokyo, and a mind-bending trip into the capital's
seedy underbelly.
Joe Sinclair
Dressed
in the black robes of a wandering samurai, Ebizo Ichikawa XI struts out
to the centre of the stage and turns towards the auditorium, hands on
hips. His face, legs and hands are still plastered in white makeup. But
he has taken off his wig.
He calls out an order and the lights dim, sending the river, flowers and bushes into darkness. But beneath the spotlight, the twenty-eight year old, kabuki's new superstar is glowing.
The dress rehearsal went well, but there are details to finalise and
Ebizo is not yet satisfied. The lighting, the set, the performances,
must all be perfect for tomorrow's first night.
Joe Sinclair
It is estimated that about 15% of the American population, and no less than 36% of those between 25 and 29, sport at least one tattoo. America being America, that is a fairly reliable indicator of how popular getting a tattoo is anywhere in the world at the moment. Japan, with its own venerable tradition of tattooing, is no exception.
However the way that tattooing developed in Japan means that until very recently it was something that stigmatized and alienated the wearer, perhaps even more than in the West.
Apparently tattooing began in the 17th century in Japan as a reaction
against laws that sought to lock society into a rigid class structure
by prescribing and proscribing certain ways of behaving, eating, dressing,
and styling oneself.
David Stormer
JapanVisitor.com recently spoke with photographer and filmmaker John Foster.
His film "Kyoto Nocturnes, Part 1: Elegant Slaughter" played at the
Kansai International Film Festival. The film is, in the words of KyotoNoir,
about a "psychotic yakuza boss [that] hires an alluring American hit
woman to end a gang war in the geisha district of Japan's ancient capital."
Originally from New York, Foster first came to Japan in the early 1990s
and takes about the experience of being a foreign filmmaker in Japan.
C. Ogawa
A vivid, yet ephemeral red-skirted pair of legs - only just identifiable as
such - swirling astride a chaotic cityscape. This was my first encounter
with the work of Tokyo-based German photographer, Barbara Flatten. It
was May, 2007, at the fourth of the Naked Tokyo events in Roppongi.
This depiction of ghostly flamboyance haunting an impersonal urban clutter
kept me in front of the giant photograph for minutes. There was a mysteriousness
about this rainbow-toned, unpindownable movement - not only in this
particular photo, but in all of Flatten's other works, too.
David Stormer
Gay Bar Owner "Take-san"
The owner of a gay bar in Tokyo's Ni-chome district, Take [pronounced
ta-kay]-san, has operated Usagi since 2006. Until then he was associated
with GB, a long-running Ni-Chome institution, where he was a barman.
He talks about coming out, running a gay bar in Shinjuku and the changing
nature of Japan's gay scene.
This interview was later withdrawn at the request of interviewee
David Stormer
Self-confessed baseball fanatic Kenichi Iwamoto went to college in the US to
try his luck in life after a junior high school injury ruled him out
playing the game at a high level. Iwamoto eventually became the translator
for Tsuyoshi Shinjo at the New York Mets and Trey Hillman in Japan,
when the American managed the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters.
Andrea Marcus
Satoshi "Ransui" Yakata is a young Japanese calligraphy and watercolor
master active in Tokyo, Japan, and with a broad international portfolio.
The watercolor painting he specializes in is known as suiboku: a traditional
style that, like calligraphy itself, originated in China. I got to know
Ransui (his professional name) in 2006 when, eager to try calligraphy,
I was introduced to him through a friend. Ever cheerful, and with a
maturity beyond his years, he inspired me both with his buoyancy of
spirit and consummate skill with the brush.
David Stormer
Kyoto is home to eleven recognized Dowa areas. These are the neighborhoods
in which the Burakumin live. These people are the historical outcastes
of Japan whose ancestors performed unclean work ? often work with corpses
or animal skins ? and were restricted to living in certain areas of
the city and throughout Japan. From the late 1960s until 2002, residents
of officially recognized Buraku areas received affirmative action benefits
from both the national and local governments.
C. Ogawa
James Heisig is Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Letters and Permanent
Research Fellow of the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture at
Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan. Professor Heisig is best known for
his Remembering
the Kanji and Remembering
the Kana books, which have now been published in English, French,
Spanish, German, Portuguese, and Dutch, with the Hungarian and Italian
translations currently being prepared. He has also recently published
similar books for students of Chinese, Remembering
Traditional Hanzi and Remembering
Simplified Hanzi.
David White
Interviews: 1 | 2
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