Waiting on the Weather

Yoji Yamada’s adaptation of Teruyo Nogami （野上照代）’s memoir Kaabee – Our Mother made a splash at the Berlinale earlier this year. It is wonderful that Nogami has distinguished herself as more than just an assistant to Kurosawa with her recent autobiographical writing. Many Japanese women have worked diligently behind the scenes in the Japanese filmmaking industry, but few of Nogami’s generation have...

Maya Yonesho

The work of animation artist Maya Yonesho (米正万也) jumped out at me when I first watched the collaborative film Winter Days because her unique style of combining types of handmade animation (stop motion of a book and watercolour animation on the pages of the book) reminded me of the experimental films of Norman McLaren and Oskar Fischinger. In a recent e-mail exchange with me, Yonesho added the names...

More on Tomoyasu Murata

Midnight Eye has published an article I wrote about the career of Tomoyasu Murata. It includes a filmography of his work. Check it out here. I have written reviews of some of his films elsewhere on this blog. I first discovered his work when he had an exhibition at a small gallery on Hongo Dori near my home in Nishikata and I wrote about the discovery. Since then, I have been to other exhibitions...

Ying Li's Yasukuni (靖国, 2007)

I was glad to hear that the first public screenings in Tokyo of Ying Li’s controversial new documentary Yasukuni went off without a hitch. In fact, according to The Japan Times, the general response from spectators was positive.The controversy that has raged in the Japanese media over Yasukuni this past month seems highly ironic in light of the fact most of those weighing in on the debate had not...

The Kyu Sakamoto Story (上を向いて歩こう〜坂本九物語〜, 2005)

I wept my way through last half of the biopic Ue wo Muite Arukou: Sakamoto Kyu Monogatari last night. The made-for-TV drama, which originally aired on Tokyo TV back in 2005 to mark the 20th anniversary of Kyu Sakamoto’s death, pushes all the usual buttons from a J-dorama. Even though it was all very predictable – his story has become a legend – hearing the songs and seeing the smiling face of Tatsuya...