Tom Baker (Chiba-ken, 1989-91) is a staff writer for The Daily Yomiuri. As another example of JET ROI, he is one of at least four former JETS to have been on the newspaper’s staff in recent years. He usually writes for DYWeekend, the arts and leisure section. You can follow Tom’s blog at tokyotombaker.wordpress.com.
Recently he interviewed two members of the cast of “The Last Airbender” movie during their promotional visit to Tokyo, asking them for their views on the “racebending” controversy surrounding their film. He also covered an insect show now running at a Tokyo museum, reviewed the manga “Otomen,” and weighed in on a couple of other movies now playing in Japan. Here are some excerpts:
“Last Airbender”
In the United States, some fans of the anime-style cartoon on which the movie is based have protested against the casting of Jackson Rathbone and Nicola Peltz, who are white, in roles the fans saw as Asian.
Asked to comment on that, Rathbone said: “I originally was a finalist for Prince Zuko [a Fire Nation role that went to Slumdog Millionaire star Dev Patel]. Almost a year later, I was brought back in for the character of Sokka…I think what they were really looking for was the qualities that people represent, not so much focusing on race…All these characters [in the cartoon] have so many different features, you can’t really say that they are one race…It’s a shame that people really focus on the race thing and they don’t understand that it’s a story for everyone.”
“And there are over 120 different types of people in the film,” Peltz added.
“In terms of a big-budget film, it’s the most ethnically diverse cast there’s ever been,” Rathbone agreed.
Read the rest of the interview here.
“Insects festival”
Open your window on a hot summer day and you may hear a sound that caught the ear of haiku poet Matsuo Basho in the 17th century: the voices of cicadas, seeping into the rocks. Of course, Japan today is a lot more urbanized than it was in Basho’s time, and cicadas are more likely to sing against a background of asphalt and cement. Yet year after year, the buzzing bugs never fail to show up, even in the heart of Tokyo.
Visitors to Insects Festival, an exhibition now running at the Edo-Tokyo Museum in Ryogoku, Tokyo, are reminded of such persistence right away with a display of six-legged critters that live in three different Tokyo zones: mountains, fields and downtown areas.
While city-dwellers often resent sharing space with the likes of cockroaches and ants, the emphasis of this show is on seasonal outdoor insects whose diverse shapes, bright colors and occasional songs actually enhance city life…
Read the rest of the article here, or visit the exhibition’s site here.
“Otomen”
Anyone writing a graduate thesis on the presentation of gender in Japanese pop culture will find abundant material in the manga series Otomen. Readers looking for laughs will also find what they seek in Otomen, but rather less abundantly.
The main characters are a trio of high school students, with the focus on Asuka (a boy who has a name more common for girls), who is in love with Ryo (a girl who has a name more common for boys). Their would-be romance is complicated by the constant presence of their friend Juta, who tries to play cupid, but is more often a third wheel.
Asuka is the captain of the school kendo team, and is admired by everyone as a “real man.” But he is secretly an “otomen,” a boy who is into girly things, such as cute stuffed animals and delicate pastries. He is at least as skilled at cooking and sewing as he is at sports, but he keeps that side of himself hidden. Ryo is Asuka’s mirror image in that she has been raised by her socially inept father to follow in his footsteps as a martial arts champion, but she strives to put up a feminine front at school. Juta has a secret, too, as he is actually a best-selling manga artist who is using the couple as a model for his stories…
Also playing…
You can read Tom’s review of “Inception” here, and his review of “Zombieland” here.
Tom Baker (Chiba-ken, 1989-91) is a staff writer for The Daily Yomiuri. He usually writes for DYWeekend, the paper’s arts and leisure section. You can follow Tom’s blog at tokyotombaker.wordpress.com.
Recently he reviewed movies, “Crazy Heart” and “Brothers.” He found poetry in both of them. Here are some excerpts:
“Crazy Heart”
Country music singer-songwriter Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, sweats like a pig, and urinates into a plastic jug while driving from town to town. As I watched him perform under hot lights at a variety of small and unglamorous venues in the movie Crazy Heart, I could almost smell him. He didn’t smell very nice.
…
On the bright side, Bad’s personal problems are grist for the mill. One of his most popular songs looks back on a dissipated life with the refrain, “Funny how fallin’ feels like flyin’/for a little while.”
Anyone who doubts that country music is the primary home of modern American poetry should meditate on that line. “Funny how fallin’ feels like flyin’” is alliterative and catchy, but also trenchant. And Bad has flown and fallen quite a way…
Read the rest of the review here.
“Brothers”
In William Shakespeare’s play about his life, King Richard II is forced to surrender his crown to his usurper cousin Henry IV. In doing so, Richard compares himself and Henry to two buckets in a well: “The emptier ever dancing in the air,/The other down, unseen and full of water:/That bucket down and full of tears am I,/Drinking my griefs while you mount up on high.”
The title characters in Brothers, although they dwell in an American suburb rather than an English castle, are not unlike the tragic royal cousins.
Sam (Tobey Maguire) is an upstanding husband, father and U.S. marine who is about to be separated from his family for a tour of duty in Afghanistan. On the eve of Sam’s departure, his surly brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal), a ne’er-do-well with a drinking problem, rejoins the extended family after a stint in prison…
Read the rest of the review here.
Tom Baker (Chiba-ken, 1989-91) is a staff writer for The Daily Yomiuri. He usually writes for DYWeekend, the paper’s arts and leisure section. You can follow Tom’s blog at tokyotombaker.wordpress.com.
He recently interviewed Shane Acker, director of the animated film “9” and Richard Kelly, who most recently directed “The Box,” a thriller starring Cameron Diaz. He also reviewed the manga “Hot Gimmick.” Here are some excerpts:
Shane Acker
[The characters in the movie are all animated dolls with numbers instead of names.] A different personality aspect is dominant in each one. Rigid orthodoxy is represented by leader 1 (voiced by Christopher Plummer), creativity by inventor 2 (Martin Landau), bravery by warrior 7 (Jennifer Connelly) and so on. Elijah Wood does the voice of 9, the truth-seeker of the group, and John C. Reilly voices his timid friend, 5…
The most amusing character is 8 (Fred Tatasciore), who embodies sheer physicality. In one scene, he achieves a moment of strange bliss by stroking his head with a large magnet, an activity that Acker called “degaussing himself.”
“In film school, especially in the days of video, if you had a videotape and you wanted to just wipe it clean, there’s a degaussing machine, which is basically like a supermagnet, and you would wave the videotape over the degausser and it would just take off all the footage that’s on there,” Acker explained. “So that’s the kind of idea, he’s sort of wiping his memory banks. You realize why he’s so dumb.”
Richard Kelly
Imagine that a mysterious stranger has just handed you a wooden box with a red button on top. He explains, rather convincingly, that if you push the button two things will happen: Someone whom you don’t know will die, and you will receive a payment of 1 million dollars…
In writer-director Richard Kelly’s movie The Box, based on a short story by Richard Matheson, the stranger’s name is Arlington Steward (Frank Langella), and he is conducting a high-stakes social experiment by visiting the homes of middle-class American couples and offering them the choice of pushing the button or not.
“Tonally this movie crosses a lot of genres,” Kelly, who previously wrote and directed Donnie Darko (2001) and Southland Tales (2006), told The Daily Yomiuri in a recent phone interview. “It’s a science fiction film, it’s a domestic melodrama, it’s a suspense film, there’s elements of horror in it, and there’s also some black comedy inherent…The conceit of pushing this button on this contraption and someone you don’t know dying is very mischievous. Anyone who would build this contraption and make this offer is smirking when they do it. And Matheson was smirking, I’m sure, when he wrote this short story.”
…[The story is set in the 1970s because] the mysterious stranger is a character type whose day has passed, according to Kelly. “When I set out to write this screenplay, I initially was trying to figure out how to make it work present-day, but when you introduce modern technology and the Internet, social networking sites, Google maps, satellite maps, reality TV, just our media-saturated world that we live in…there is no such thing as a real stranger anymore. Everyone can be found on the Internet. You can find anyone’s house, you can go onto a satellite map with a 360-degree view.”
“Hot Gimmick”
[In this manga, a high school girl’s seriously unhealthy relationships with her would-be boyfriends is presented as perfectly normal.]
For example, the day after one of her suitors is unable to reach her by phone (for reasons that are no one’s fault), he slaps her across the face so hard that bystanders rush to offer first aid. But Hatsumi chases after him to make the following speech, which he receives in stony silence: “I’m sorry. For being so clueless. For…never being able to get your calls…I’m so sorry. I’m really sorry. For not understanding how you feel about me. I’m sorry.”
Later, when one of the boys proposes to her, she thinks, “Maybe if we got married, he’d finally be nice to me.”
She seems unaware of some basic principles of healthy human interaction, such as this simple standard: If a friend arranges for you to be gang-raped, that person is not really your friend.
Tom Baker (Chiba-ken, 1989-91) is a staff writer for The Daily Yomiuri. He usually writes for DYWeekend, the paper’s arts and leisure section. You can follow Tom’s blog at tokyotombaker.wordpress.com.
His two latest articles are movie reviews, one of “The Wolfman,” and one that discusses “Moon” and “Shutter Island” together. Here are some excerpts:
THE WOLFMAN
In most werewolf movies nowadays, it is standard to show a person’s nose and jaw elongating into a snaggletoothed lupine muzzle when they transform from human to wolf. [Makeup artist Rick] Baker has done that before, but in this film he pays homage to Lon Chaney Jr.’s furry but still humanoid look in the 1941 film The Wolf Man, on which the new film is based. Then and now, the title monster has modest fangs, a woolly forehead, a beard that goes up to his eyes and a nose that darkens at the tip.
Our first glimpse of Baker’s version of this classic face is literally over in a flash, as we see it illuminated by a pistol shot during a nocturnal battle. (In case you missed it the first time, the scene repeats a moment later, with a larger gun.) Later scenes reveal the monster’s face at greater length.
MOON and SHUTTER ISLAND
Teddy Daniels and Sam Bell are men who love their wives. They are also the respective protagonists of two new movies, Shutter Island and Moon, that take us far enough inside the characters’ heads to see each man passionately embracing his wife in a dream.
But when Teddy awakes, he finds himself trapped on his movie’s titular island, unhappily remembering that his wife has been dead for years. And when Sam awakes, he finds himself trapped on his movie’s titular heavenly body, unhappily remembering that his wife is on Earth, and he has not seen her for many months.
Teddy (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a U.S. marshall investigating the disappearance of an inmate from a prison hospital for the criminally insane on Shutter Island, Mass., in the 1950s. Sam (Sam Rockwell) is the solitary human staffer of a mining facility on the dark side of the moon, possibly in the 2050s.
The settings are very different, but both are ominous, isolated places in which intense psychological drama will unfold. In both movies, the protagonists have high-stakes confrontations with themselves, and with the powers that be.
Read the rest of the review here. The review is deliberately spoiler-free, but you can read Tom’s further comments about the endings of “Moon” here and “Shutter Island” here.
Tom Baker (Chiba-ken, 1989-91) is a staff writer for The Daily Yomiuri. He usually writes for DYWeekend, the paper’s arts and leisure section. You can follow Tom’s blog at tokyotombaker.wordpress.com.
Last Friday he had two movie articles in the paper: a review of “Sherlock Holmes,” which you can read here, and an interview with martial artist Jon Foo, who stars in a new movie based on the “Tekken” series of video games. Here is an excerpt:
“My mom, she does judo, and my dad did karate, so I learned a lot from them growing up,” Foo told The Daily Yomiuri in an interview in Tokyo last week. “My mom used to do throws; tomoenage was her favorite. She’d pick me up, kick me in the air and I landed on the bed. And I’d do conditioning. And then I moved on to kung fu, tae kwon do, Muay Thai. Just take the best from each and mix it [considering] whatever suits my body, and I’ll take that and I’ll use that to perform to my best.”
Foo, 27, has had supporting roles in action movies in several countries, but Tekken puts him in the lead for the first time.
He plays Jin Kazama, a young man who makes a living as a fleet-footed courier in a postapocalyptic world ruled by corporations, one of which is Tekken (a name that translates as “iron fist”)…
…Tekken’s top boss, Heihachi Mishima, is an elderly man–but a mean fighter–whose shiny bald dome is framed by an erect ruff of gray hair that looks like a set of tail fins from a 1950s Cadillac. The hair and makeup people did a hilarious job of replicating this look on actor Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, but they were more restrained when it came to just hinting at Jin’s swept-back hairstyle with Foo. We’re probably meant to laugh at some parts of this film, but Jin has to hold the audience’s sympathy.
Read the rest of the article here.
Tom Baker (Chiba-ken, 1989-91) is a staff writer for The Daily Yomiuri. A big part of his beat is the Pop Culture page, which covers manga, anime and video games. You can follow Tom’s blog at tokyotombaker.wordpress.com.
He also writes movie reviews. Here is an excerpt from a recent review of “I Love You Phillip Morris,” in which Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor play Steven and Phillip, the lead characters in a gay romantic-comedy/prison-break film that is based on a true story. It opens March 17 in Britain and April 30 in the United States, but is already playing in Japan.
McGregor’s sweet and naive Phillip is totally believable. Harmlessly meek and far too trusting, yet somehow uttering the lion’s share of the laugh lines, he makes you want to protect him, which is also how Steven feels. “You only see the good in people,” marvels Steven, whose own outlook is far more cynical.
Carrey, who does appear in good movies now and then, is not always as believable in his role, but this is appropriate since he plays a chronic fake who is always trying on new identities and tells lies to everyone he meets. Late in the movie, when Steven tries to prove his love by revealing his true self to Phillip, he can’t really do it.
Steven is a criminal who went to prison because he belonged there. But his scams are amusing because his wealthy victims are entertainingly depicted (fairly or not) as crude, pompous fools. And his various prison escapes are amazing. In one, he uses felt-tip markers and toilet water to dye his prison uniform green, enabling him to walk right out in the guise of a visiting doctor…
Read the rest of the article here.
By Steven Horowitz (Aichi-ken, 1992-94)
Just wanted to share that I had a really terrific dinner the other night at Kajitsu (www.kajitsunyc.com), a new and very unique Japanese restaurant on E. 9th Street in NYC, thanks to professional translator Jamie Graves (Saitama-ken, 2002-03) who not only waits tables in the intimate establishment but also translates the menu and other texts for Kajitsu and interprets for important clients.
Kajitu's Chef Masato Nishihara
Jamie, who specializes in translations relating to food and cooking, explained to me a few months ago at a JETAA NY gathering that he was working at a restaurant that specializes in shojin cuisine, which as a non-foodie I can best describe as a sort of high-end, vegan kaiseki. The chef, Masato Nishihara, had worked at Kitcho, a very prestigious kaiseki cuisine restaurant in Kyoto before coming to New York to open Kajitsu.
I can’t remember exactly what I ate, but each course did really blow me away in terms of both flavors and creativity. Plus the soba dipping noodles may be the best in NYC. The menu changes every month, so apparently a number of regulars come back each month to sample the new menu.
The fare is not inexpensive. But it’s well worth it if you have a special occasion to celebrate (which I did!) Especially if you get a seat at the counter where you can watch Chef Nishihara prepare each course right front of you, including his zen-like tea ceremony approach to making the macha at the end of the meal. (According to Jamie, all chefs at Kitcho must study tea ceremony.)
From the March "Spring" menu: Clear Soup with Sticky Rice Ball Mugwort, Rice Crackers.
Here’s a little additional background on Kajitsu from it’s website:
Kajitsu – “Fine Day”
Kajitsu means “fine day”, or “day of celebration” in Japanese. We have chosen the name Kajitsu hoping that a visit here will always be a special occasion for our guests.Shojin Cuisine
Shojin cuisine refers to a type of vegetarian cooking that originates in Zen Buddhism. Even though it does not use meat or fish, shojin is regarded as the foundation of all Japanese cuisine, especially kaiseki, the Japanese version of haute cuisine.
If you decide you have your own special occasion, make sure to say hi to Jamie and ask him all of your questions about the restaurant and the food. There’s lots to tell and lots to learn.
Kajitsu (www.kajitsunyc.com) is on E. 9th St between 1st Ave & Avenue A in New York City.
Tom Baker (Chiba-ken, 1989-91) is a staff writer for The Daily Yomiuri. A big part of his beat is the Pop Culture page, which covers manga, anime and video games. You can follow Tom’s blog at tokyotombaker.wordpress.com.
Here is his latest video game review, of “Uncharted” and “Uncharted 2” which Sony recently released as a box set in Japan:
My pal Nate is such a great guy that he keeps hanging out with me despite the fact that I’ve gotten him killed hundreds of times, usually by explosions, gunfire or plunges from cliffs. It’s a good thing he’s made out of pixels, or this relationship would be a lot harder on both of us.
Digital though he may be, Nathan Drake, the lead character in the Sony PlayStation 3 video games Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (2007) and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (2009), is so lifelike and likeable that it is not unusual for players to think of him as someone who really exists.
The two games, re-released Feb. 18 as a 7,980 yen box set, are swashbuckling adventures from the Indiana Jones school in which our hero and a few friends hunt for treasure in exotic locales while fighting off gangsters and pirates who are also after the loot. And also as in Jones’ world, events take a paranormal turn once the treasure is uncovered…
Read the rest of the review here.
Tom Baker (Chiba-ken, 1989-91) is a staff writer for The Daily Yomiuri. A big part of his beat is the Pop Culture page, which covers manga, anime and video games. You can follow Tom’s blog at tokyotombaker.wordpress.com.
Here is his latest manga review, of Ooku by Fumi Yoshinaga:
With its shrinking population, chronically depressed birthrate and rising average age, Japan is fated for major social changes in the fairly near future. How that will play out remains to be seen, but Fumi Yoshinaga’s manga series Ooku: The Inner Chamber is an example of how popular art can tap
into real-world social anxieties.
Ooku is set in an alternate-history Japan that also faces a demographic crisis, but of a different type. In the 1630s, a mysterious epidemic called Redface Pox kills 75 percent of Japan’s men, while leaving women physically unharmed.
The disease lingers, the gender imbalance never rights itself, and Japanese society comes to resemble a colony of bees or ants, in which the large female majority does every kind of work while the male minority are seen as delicate creatures valued only for their “seed.”
With women forced to share the limited supply of men, the institution of marriage largely disappears, as only a rich woman can keep a husband all to herself. The wealthiest and most powerful woman of all is the shogun, who keeps a crowded male harem in the innermost chambers–the Ooku–of Edo Castle…
Read the rest of the review here.
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JQ Editor Justin Tedaldi (CIR Kobe-shi, 2000-01) has worked hard to put out another fantastic issue of JETAA NY Quarterly Magazine (aka JQ). O-tsukare sama deshita, Justin-san!
Start the decade off right!
JAN/FEB 2010 ISSUE: Click image below for our homepage
Click here to SUBSCRIBE via PayPal
Editor: Justin Tedaldi – magazine@jetaany.org
JAN/FEB 2010 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page 3……..Letter From the Editor / Letter From the Secretary
Page 4……..Nippon News Blotter / JetWit Baby
Page 5……..Peace Corps Calls Out to JETs by Marea Pariser
Page 6……..Gearing Up for Grad School by Aly Woolfrey
Page 6……..At the ISE Cultural Gallery by Michael Glumac
Page 7……..Harumi Kurihara: The JQ Interview by Yukari Sakamoto
Page 8……..Nihonjin in New York – Featuring Filmmaker Takayuki Tanaka by Stacy Smith
Page 9……..Lisa Katayama on 2-D Love, Japan Pop by Crystal Wong
Page 9……..The Legacy of Tokyo Story by David Kowalsky
Page 10……JETlog – Featuring John Ellis-Guardiola
Page 10……The Language(s) of Love: Wendy Nelson Tokunaga by Nichole Knight
Page 11…….Bridge Building with Filmmaker Aaron Woolfolk by Lyle Sylvander
Page 12……The Funny Page
Here’s a nice review of Japanamerica (by Roland Kelts (Osaka-shi, 1998-99) on the blog Fan-to-Pro: The Blog of Professional Geekery, which describes itself as “a blog about jobs, career and economics for ambitious fans, progeeks, Otariimen and other members of the Modern Literati.”
http://www.fantopro.com/blog/2009/12/book-review-japanamerica.html
Just in time for the holidays, in case you’re looking for that special gift for that special JET friend or Friend of JET!
JET alum and technical writer David Kowalsky has a nice book review on the book Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods in the latest edition of Sound Views, the newsletter for the Puget Sound Chapter of the Society for Technical Writers.
Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/3hix5A.
Have a look and feel free to share your thoughts on Twitter as well. Also, you can follow JetWit via Twitter at http://twitter.com/jetwit.
WITLife is a periodic series written by professional Translator/Interpreter/Writer Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken, 2000-03). Recently she’s been watching Fujisankei’s newscast in Japanese and sharing some of the interesting tidbits and trends together w
ith her own observations.
Last night I attended the North American premiere of Goemon, a movie portraying this titular folk hero who was known as the Robin Hood of Japan. It takes place during the Warring States period, and some prominent historical figures who appear are Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu. It is interesting to see Eguchi Yosuke, usually seen in lighter fare such as dramas, as the title character of legendary ninja bandit Ishikawa Goemon. Hirosue Ryoko, another drama veteran, is featured in the role of Princess Chacha whom Goemon spent his early years protecting. The movie’s plot is almost entirely fictional, and displays many dazzling special effects in a CGI-enhanced fantasy setting. The director, Kiriya Kazuaki, hails from my JET hometown of Kumamoto and is the former husband of Utada Hikaru.
During the course of the film, Goemon’s attendant talks of his aspirations to become a samurai and steadily working his way up to achieve this recognition. As the title of this post (samurai e no agokare or “longing for samurai“) suggests, the appeal of samurai has not been lost in this modern day and age. Recently various media have been Read More
Just found out that Roland Kelts (Osaka-shi, 1998-99), author of Japanamerica, has a review of “Tears in the Darkness,” a capacious, brilliantly narrated account of the Bataan Death March in World War II, featuring interviews with Japanese, American and Filipino veterans/survivors — in this month’s issue of BOOKFORUM. Inhumanity, with novelistic intimacy…
Read the review here: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_03/4339
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The Japan Times has a nice review of the novel Oh! A mystery of ‘mono no aware’ by Todd Shimoda, and published by JET alum Bruce Rutledge’s Seattle-based publishing company Chin Music Press.
The review describes “an emotionally numb and alienated technical writer” who “suddenly decides to bolt Los Angeles and visit Japan, his ancestral home.” The main character subsequently stumbles into an exploration of teenage suicide clubs as well as “mono no aware” (the pathos of things), one of those Japanese emotional concepts that tend to baffle us gaijin.
Go here for more information about Oh!: http://www.ohthenovel.com
Go here for more information about Bruce Rutledge and Chin Music Press: http://chinmusicpress.com
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From the Summer 2009 “1/4 Cheap Trick” Issue of JQ (JETAA NY Quarterly) Magazine:
Like Japanese Girls? Then You Need This Book
By Rick Ambrosio (Ibaraki-ken, 2006-08)
There I was again, outside my apartment, in the car with Hitomi. Again, at this awkward moment where we both fidget and she puts the Toni Braxton CD in. This is of course, about 10 months ago now, back in Japan. Even after living in Japan for a year and a half, I still had moments like this; social impasses as I liked to call them. We both didn’t know what to say, what to do. Well, in reality, I didn’t know what to say or do. This was before I understood what “nan demo ii” really meant, before I could fully understand all the silent cues. This was before I read David Radtke’s Understanding Japanese Women.
I know I know, you’re thinking, “oh no, not another pick-up line book. Not another cheesy how-to.” It’s what I feared before I started reading it, too. However, I was delightfully surprised that Read More
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JetWit webmaster Lee-Sean Huang (Oita-ken, 2003-06) comments after the jump on The Cove, a new documentary about dolphin hunting in Japan. Please feel free to share your own thoughts regarding this controversial film in the comments section of this post.
SUMMER 2009 ISSUE – click image below to download PDF
The leader of a band that’s sold over 20 million records and brought the words “At Budokan” to the big time, the new Japanese ambassador to New York, a tour of Philadelphia that’s uncannily Zen, and chats with award-winning writers, French pastry operations managers and even a maid-outfitted cosplay superstar complete with bunny ears. All this and more in the new summer issue of JETAANY’s JQ magazine.
THIS IS ALSO OUR LAST FREE PRINT ISSUE!
To preserve our budget for alumni events, and in an effort to be greener and save paper, JETAANY will begin charging for print copies of JQ Magazine. The cost is $12 for 4 issues and you will only have the opportunity to sign up once a year – annual subscriptions will occur each fall. Please note that the magazine, in its entirety, is also available online. If you would like to sign up to receive a paper copy by mail, please follow the PayPal link below (Add to Cart) or e-mail magazinesubscriptions@jetaany.org for more information. Remember you must put “JQ subscription” and your desired mailing address in the Paypal comments box.
Editor: Justin Tedaldi – magazine@jetaany.org
Page 3…Letter From the Editor / Professional Outreach & Development Rep
Page 4…Nippon News Blotter
Page 5…Comings & Goings
Page 6…An Interview with Ambassador Shinichi Nishimiya by Anne Koller
Page 7…JET Alum Author Cristy Burne Wins Award by Gregory Anderson
Page 8…Philadelphia Loves Japan! by Therese Stephen
Page 9…JETAA in the Big Apple and Beyond by Megan Miller
Page 10.Japan Day @ Central Park Recap by Stacy Smith
Page 10.JETlog featuring Yukari Sakamoto (Chiba-ken, 1989-1990)
Page 11.Nihonjin in NY – Featuring Beard Papa’s Masashi Wada by Janice Chow
Page 12.Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen: The JQ Interview by Justin Tedaldi
Page 13.U.S. FrontLine’s Ken Haraguchi on Japanese Newspapers by Junko Ishikawa
Page 14.JETAActivity Photos
Page 15.JET Farewell Reception at the Ambassador’s Residence
Page 16.Maid in America: Q&A with Cosplay Singer Reni by Adren Hart
Page 17.JETAANY Webmaster Lee-Sean Huang by Shree Kurlekar
Page 17.Understanding Japanese Women with David J. Radtke by Rick Ambrosio
Page 18.Theatre Review: Samurai Takamine Jokichi by Anne Koller
Page 19.Film Review: Tokyo! by David Kowalsky
Page 20.Book Corner: Sony: The Private Life by Lyle Sylvander
Page 21.KRAZY! Exhibition at Japan Society by Anton Phung
Page 22.Pop Rock: Q&A with Marshall Crenshaw by Justin Tedaldi
Page 23.Jy? Q! with JET Alum Poet James Shea by Liz Wanic
Thanks to JETAA Pacific Northwest alum David Kowalsky for sharing the following two JetWit-relevant book reviews from the NY Times:
- Manifesto of a Comic-Book Rebel – Review and comment on A DRIFTING LIFE by Yoshihiro Tatsumi; Translated by Taro Nettleton– a memoir that looks back at the roots of gekiga, Japanese comic book art’s dark side. (Click here for a blog interview with photos with Tatsumi-san and Taro Nettleton.)
- The Ponzi Workshop – Commentary on the creative writing movement and reviews of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl and The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays From Tin House.
- Bonus: A NYTimes restaurant review of Inakaya, the Japanese restaurant on the ground floor of the NY Times building in Manhattan where the show is perhaps more important than the food.
JETAANY Hosts First Author Showcase
By Gina Anderson (Nara-ken, 2003-05), former JETAA DC newsletter chair and Justin Tedaldi (CIR Kobe-shi, 2001-02), editor of JQ (JETAA NY) Quarterly Magazine
New York City’s Holiday Inn hosted a summit for published JETs as JETAANY launched its debut JET Alumni Author Showcase on March 22. The panelists included pro writers Roland Kelts (Osaka-shi, 1998-99), Robert Weston (Nara-ken, 2002-04) and James Kennedy (Nara-ken, 2004-06). (Click here and here for photos and here for video clips.)
Drawing over 60 JET alums, friends and family, the event kicked off with some words from Akira Sugiyama, director of the Japan Information Center of the Consulate General of Japan in New York. Moderator and playwright Randall David Cook (Fukui-ken, 1991-93), creator of the critically acclaimed Off Broadway plays Sake with the Haiku Geisha and Fate’s Imagination, asked each author to share a favorite selection of their works with the crowd.
A professor at three different universities including Tokyo University, a writer and editor for two magazines and a columnist for the Yomiuri Shimbun, Kelts spoke about Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S., his non-fiction book about the eponymous subject. He began by Read More
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By Rick Ambrosio (Ibaraki-ken, 2006-08) and Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken, 2000-03)
Sunshine Cinema is now showing the movie Tokyo!, a compilation of three short films from the French directors Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and Leos Carax (Lovers on the Bridge) and the Korean director Bong Joon-Ho (The Host). Gondry himself made an appearance at two showings of the film when it debuted last weekend, for a Q&A session after the 7:30 show and introducing the movie at the 10:30 show. He spoke in his typically quirky way about his time shooting in Tokyo, and how things like the spaces between buildings and how Japanese people falling asleep on each other on the train fascinated him. Before starting the show, he expressed relief that his Japanese producers weren’t there so he wouldn’t feel bad about forgetting to thank them.
Tokyo! kicks off with his contribution of “Interior Design,” a Kafkaesque story about trying to find your place in the world. The story revolves around a young couple that Read More
From the 2009 Winter Issue of JQ, the JETAA NY quarterly magazine:
A JET Alum’s Experience Makes its Way to the Stage: JQ Catches Up With Playwright Randall David Cook
By Lyle Sylvander (Yokohama-shi, 2001-02)
Three years ago, the Gotham Stage Company produced the terrific play Sake with the Haiku Geisha by JET alum Randall David Cook (Fukui-ken, 1991-93). The entire evening consisted of five one-act vignettes, all involving cross-cultural conflict among expatriates in Japan. As I noted in my review for JQ at the time, what made the play so successful was its exploration of the psychological issues confronting the main characters.
At first glance, Randall David Cook does not fit the profile of the typical playwright. As a human resources specialist with an international MBA, he was working in a corporate capacity at Newsweek magazine when two random events set him on a play writing course.
“I was dissatisfied with most of the new plays I was seeing at the time,” Cook says in his native South Carolina accent. “I kept insisting that I could do better, and one of my friends set me up on the challenge. At the same time, I was heartbroken over a relationship that had just ended and writing seemed like a good way for me to channel my emotions into a more productive pursuit.” Read More
Rose Symotiuk was a JET in Akan, Hokkaido from 2003-2005. She works in publishing in New York City. You can follow her blog at http://roseinnewyork.wordpress.com/.
Repeat After Me is the first fiction book by Rachel DeWoskin. DeWoskin went to Beijing in 1994 to work as a public-relations consultant and was quickly recruited to star in a Chinese nighttime soap opera, titled Foreign Babes in Beijing, which was watched by approximately 600 million viewers. At the time, she was one of the few foreign actresses working in mainland China and was considered a sex symbol. You can pick up her popular book about her experiences, titled Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China, here.
Repeat After Me follows the lead character, Aysha, a young New Yorker, after a mental breakdown causes her to drop out of Columbia and start teaching at an English school. There she meets Da Ge, a young Chinese man with his own problems. The story starts somewhere in the middle and unfolds in wonderous ways: from Aysha’s parents’ divorce, to her life in Beijing years later with a stunning surprise, always returning to her tragic, vivid romance with Da Ge.
Splashed across this story in bright color is China, in mouth watering Read More
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Roland Kelts (Osaka, 1998-99), author of Japanamerica, will be at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on Wednesday, February 11 for a screening + discussion of the animated film Grave of the Fireflies. More details here. (Side note: Lyle Sylvander (Yokohama-shi, 2001-02) wrote an excellent and succinct review of Grave of the Fireflies for the Spring 2008 JETAAA NY Newsletter.)
BONUS: Roland’s story on Japanese Youth Pathologies for WNYC’s Studio 360 will air on NPR nationwide as part of this coming weekend’s special Japan edition of the show. (See the recent JetWit post on last week’s Studio360 Japan feature.)
Correction: This post previously listed the date of the MFA event as February 9, but it has now been corrected to February 11. Apologies for any confusion.
After a recent business trip to Tokyo, Seattle JET alum David Kowalsky spent the weekend in Kyoto. He snapped this shot of the Lady Murasaki statue (a tribute to her authoring of The Tale of Genji), along his walk from Uji Station to the impressive Byodo-in Temple. Upon returning to the U.S., he subsequently noticed this article in the NYTimes — “Kyoto Celebrates a 1,000-Year Love Affair” — though he points out that while the NYTimes article mentions fans shooting photos in front of the statue, in his own experience there was nary a Genji fan to be found.
Note: Look for David’s book review of Natsuo Kirino’s Real World in the upcoming issue of the JETAA NY Magazine, due out at the end of January.
Mark Frey (Kumamoto-ken, 2002-06), the hardworking newsletter editor for JETAA Northern California, just published the Fall 2008 issue of Pacific Bridge.
So have a look! Take it with you to Thanksgiving. Read it while you’re stuck in traffic or at the airport. ;-)
Reviewed by Justin Tedaldi (CIR Kobe-shi 2001-02) (Originally published in the JETAA NY Fall 2008 Quarterly Newsletter)
The flames are all long gone
But the pain lingers on
-Pink Floyd, “Goodbye Blue Sky”
For all the good they’ve done advancing equal rights and universal peace in the generations since World War II, the U.S. and Japan continue to struggle with charges of insensitivity and unfair treatment of minorities stemming from that era. Two important new films highlight the historical signposts of the Japanese American internment camps of 1942-44, and the growing international tensions surrounding Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine.
Passing Poston, a documentary by journalists Joe Fox and James Nubile, premiered in America this past summer. Its narrative unspools through the tales of four of the 17,800 Japanese-American internees forced to live at Poston in Arizona, one of the 10 War Relocation Authority centers launched five months after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. While the camps were devised by the U.S. government under the guise of internal defense, they were ruled unconstitutional two years later by the Supreme Court, with formal apologies finally issued by Congress in 1988 and 1992, along with $1.6 billion issued in combined reparations to survivors and heirs.
Opening with a propaganda film from the U.S. Office of War Information to set the mood of the time, Read More
Reviewed by Lyle Sylvander (Yokohama-shi, 2001-02) (Originally published in the JETAA NY Fall 2008 Quarterly Newsletter)
Bookstores are stocked full of tomes charting the recent rise of India and China. The IT and computer programming revolution in the former and the manufacturing explosion in the latter have accompanied such massive population growth in both countries that the world’s attention has naturally shifted to that region of Asia.
In this context, Kenneth Pyle’s new book Japan Rising: The Resurgence of Japanese Power and Purpose may seem anachronistic, as a holdover from the 1980s, the decade when, to quote a book from the era, Japan would be “first among equals.” But Pyle, a Professor of Asian history at the University of Washington, makes a strong case for Japan’s continuing relevance in the international global community, both politically and economically. His book is a fascinating account of Japanese foreign policy history, from its origins in the Meiji era to its current strategic calculations.
Much commentary has been made about Japan’s ability to preserve tradition while adapting to foreign Read More
Akiko Wada, interviewed at Kinokuniya by Store Manager John Fuller
By Justin Tedaldi (CIR Kobe-shi, 2001-02)
If you’ve ever watched TV in Japan on New Year’s Eve, chances are you’ve seen Akiko Wada. One of Japan’s most celebrated stars, the singer and entertainment personality has made over 20 appearances on the annual Kohaku Uta Gassen (Red-White Song Contest). To celebrate her 40th year in show business, the “Female Emperor” performed a landmark one-night-only concert, Power & Soul, at Harlem’s renowned Apollo Theater on September 29.
Born in Osaka, the headstrong Wada made her recording debut in 1968, shortly after dropping out of high school at age 17. The following year, she broke big with “Doushaburi no Ame no Naka de” (In the Pouring Rain), with pop stardom and numerous variety show hosting gigs to follow. With her tall, stocky build and direct nature, Wada is something of an anomaly in the Japanese entertainment world, where women are less encouraged to speak their mind or even think about criticizing their peers.
Three days before the Apollo date, Wada held court at a press event in Midtown’s Kinokuniya Books. Hosted by store manager John Fuller, the conference (conducted entirely in Japanese) kicked off with an a cappella performance of “Amazing Grace” from American vocal trio The Wild Women, who also opened Wada’s concert.
The superstar then emerged from the back to thunderous applause, fielding questions from Fuller and the Japanese media. She gushed about New York, which she’s visited eight times, and explained that she hand-picked the Apollo over venues like Carnegie Hall because of the “sacred place”‘s ties to the R&B acts that inspired her growing up.
Other questions focused on her rehearsal of English-language songs Read More
By Kirsten Phillips (Niigata-ken, 2007-08) (from the Fall 2008 JETAA NY Quarterly Newsletter)
I had frequented many an urban Japanese supermarket in my college days, but a megastore like Mitsuwa always meant something special. Mostly because it required bus fare, a map, and a ranger with a sword to reach the distant shores of Edgewater, New Jersey. Crossing state lines just for konnyaku? A mad quest, indeed.
But if you want something bad enough, you’ll go the distance.
I can definitely say that it’s really not as complicated to reach Mitsuwa in New Jersey as some New Yorkers may think. There is a regular and convenient bus service that leaves from Port Authority directly to and from Mitsuwa. But, why bother hitting up Mitsuwa if you can get Japanese goods at Sunrise or Katagiri? Well, just for the sheer variety and size. Going to Mitsuwa is definitely a fun and less-cramped experience than going to the more local NY spots.
Besides, Mitsuwa offers a lot more than just quality yam starch jelly. It is the experience that makes me cough up the change and head on over. As well as an impressively-stocked supermarket, Mitsuwa also offers an authentic shokudo/kissaten cafe experience serving quickly made and reasonably priced Japanese dishes. Everything from tonkatsu to Japanese-style pasta is served in the often-crowded food court. There is also a delicious bakery for those who long for freshly baked an pan and miss eating toast as big and fluffy as a pillow. There’s even a small stall devoted to sweet festival treats such as tai-yaki and oban-yaki. Read More
JetWit is seeking reviews of Japanese films (recent or old) from any JET alums or Friends of JET who want to write one. No deadline. If you want to write one at any point, just send it in to stevenwaseda /atto/ jetwit /dotto/ com.
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