hmmn

Mind you, I’m not bothered in the slightest that I can’t access Bush’s website, I’ve never until tonight tried to access it before and I suspect I never will again (but being the good reporter I am, I have just viewed the site via proxy). Why the Bush camp decided to ban overseas visitors from [...]

It’s things like this that bring home just how hard it is for me to get into that “world’s sport” football, or as we call it back home (and in Japan), soccer: England captain David Beckham has admitted that he got a penalty on purpose so that he would miss his next game, a World [...]

So yesterday as I was emerging from the depths of Shinjuku station, I came up not to fresh air but the formulaic strains of some Japanese pop group and a bunch of craned-neck fans ooh-ing and ah-ing. Based on the audience being 99% female, perhaps it was one of Johnny’s boy bands performing (Johnny Kitagawa [...]

In Japanese, sitting in a circle is called kurumaza, literally, “wheel seating.” A kurumaza formation can put others off, since all they see of the people forming the circle is their backs, which seems to be saying, “The rest of you are outsiders.” To be sure, when the kurumaza is formed on the ground outdoors, [...]

Ginza, Tokyo, July 2, 2004

On view for three more weeks or so at the Mitaka City Gallery of Art in west Tokyo is a retrospective of the work of Shigeo Gocho, a Tokyo-based photographer who died at the young age of 36 (1946 – 83). Born in Niigata, from the age of four Gocho suffered from caries of his [...]