Category: CULTURE

After a teaser a few weeks ago, the official trailer has been released for "Godzilla", the new American film adaptation of Japan's most famous monster. Hollywood has a very bad track record when ...

In this hardened digital age, promoting people to read poetry can be an unenviable task. While Twitter has brought the epigram into the modern era, we seem to have less and less patience. It is ...

The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum has demanded the removal of an artwork that criticizes the visits to Yasukuni Shrine by members of the Japanese government. The exhibition is now running, set to ...

Japan is a country that seems to inspire more than its far share of stereotypes and myths. The overseas media is also complicit in perpetuating many of the images of Japan that make it seem weird, ...

Anyone whose finger has been even intermittently on the pulse of Japanese cultural trends in the past couple of years has surely heard about cat cafes. Basically they're just what they sound like: ...

Work by the composer of the most famous pieces of Japanese contemporary classical music from this century is now alleged not to have been composed wholly by its official creator. The score for ...

The Koppu no Fuchiko ("Fuchiko on the edge of the cup") by Kitan Club and Katsuki Tanaka was first released in 2012 as a Gashapon capsule toy. In a nutshell, it's a series of cute figurines of an ...

After debuting last year, the Tokyo International Literary Festival is back. For such a literary city, it is shocking that Tokyo never had its own proper literature festival until last year. ...

For as long as I can remember, comic books have been tightly wrapped in plastic covers, refusing to reveal their content to any passersby in a bookstore. It hasn't been too long since convenience ...

Heading to a Japanese onsen (hot spring) is one of the best trips you can do in Japan during the winter. But the exclusive onsen resorts don't come cheap and they need to keep innovating to ...

Only a few weeks into her post as US Ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy has already waded into one of the most tricky of diplomatic areas. As such rows often do these days, it erupted over a ...

Retro is still going strong, it seems. If you're a fan of Ultraman baddies, then head on down to Kawasaki in March to visit the Kaijyu Sakaba. Not surprisingly, it is themed around the kaiju (or ...

There may (or may not) be a storm brewing about airline ANA's latest TV ad. It shows two pilots at an airport, gazing out at the tarmac at Haneda Airport and waxing lyrical about the newly ...

Miss International, Ikumi Yoshimatsu, who famously came forward recently about the remarkable stalking she suffered at the hands of Japan's entertainment world movers and shakers, has now gone one ...

Movie adaptations of video games rarely work. For every Silent Hill and Resident Evil there's a Final Fantasy, Super Mario Bros. or Prince of Persia. But things go better when Hollywood isn't ...