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Jan 16, 2025 | 
japantimes.co.jp | James Hadfield
Toward the end of his life, Ryuichi Sakamoto spoke of wanting to make “music freed from the constraints of time.” As the musician told the Asahi Shimbun in 2019, “I guess it is similar to how I long for ‘eternity.’”It was natural for him to look beyond the limitations of audio recordings or live performances, a search that led him to the gallery.
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
japantimes.co.jp | James Hadfield
Casting a household-name actor to headline a period epic would normally be seen as a safe bet, but the producers of “Muromachi Outsiders” were taking a risk when they picked Yo Oizumi for the project. The 51-year-old is an entertainer in the Ryan Reynolds mold, with a wisecracking persona that tends to vary little from one screen appearance to the next. So perhaps the biggest surprise about Yu Irie’s film is how convincingly Oizumi inhabits the role of a 15th-century rebel leader.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
businessandamerica.com | James Hadfield
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
japantimes.co.jp | Tomoko Otake |Kathryn Wortley |James Hadfield
Yes, they really turned it into a movie. Across 10 seasons of TV Tokyo’s “The Solitary Gourmet,” salaryman Goro Inogashira (Yutaka Matsushige) has chomped and slurped his way through more than 100 restaurants, often with little but his inner monologue for company. Based on a manga by Masayuki Qusumi and Jiro Taniguchi, the series is pure comfort food and an obvious forerunner to what’s now known as ambient TV.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
japantimes.co.jp | James Hadfield
British Japanese director Ema Ryan Yamazaki’s documentaries are a process of trying to understand the culture in which she grew up. “Koshien: Japan’s Field of Dreams” (2019) used a high school baseball tournament as a window into Japanese society. “Monk by Blood” (2013) and “Temple Family” (2021) meditated on the age-old tussle between tradition and progress, via the story of a priest-to-be with a taste for DJing.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
japantimes.co.jp | James Hadfield
Fugitives in Japan enjoy a curious celebrity, their faces plastered on billboards and regularly featured in TV news segments. It’s a marvel that some of them manage to evade capture for so long. Suspected terrorist Satoshi Kirishima had been at large for nearly 50 years when he revealed his true identity in January, shortly before dying from cancer. Maybe it helped that the photo in his wanted poster — long-haired, fresh-faced and smiling — didn’t look like someone who was a menace to society.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
japantimes.co.jp | James Hadfield
It took a while for Junichi Yasuda to realize that he had a winner on his hands. In August, the filmmaker’s low-budget feature “A Samurai in Time” opened at a single theater in Tokyo. A comedy about a 19th-century warrior who finds himself transported to present-day Japan, the movie had been warmly received at Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival the previous month. Local audiences seemed to like it, too. Yasuda’s phone was buzzing with messages, but he didn’t let that go to his head.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
japantimes.co.jp | James Hadfield
Living in Japan, you’re reminded with such frequency about the threat of scams, it’s easy to imagine that you’d be wise to a potential con when it went down.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
japantimes.co.jp | James Hadfield
Sometimes it’s all about the casting. Hiroya Shimizu and Mahiro Takasugi have an on- and off-screen bromance that stretches back to when they appeared together in the 2012 TV drama “High School Entrance Exam.” Their rapport is one of the best things about “Oasis,” a mostly generic crime drama by first-time director Takuro Iwaya, who also wrote the script.
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Oct 30, 2024 | 
japantimes.co.jp | James Hadfield
The samurai period drama is a rite of passage for many Japanese filmmakers, but Kazuya Shiraishi has followed up his first foray into the genre by heading straight back for more. Whereas the director’s “Bushido,” released earlier this year, was a character-driven drama that just happened to feature a bit of swordplay, “11 Rebels” leans more on spectacle.
