My favorite was Wasabi from director Bunji Sotoyama, which stars Kyoko Yoshine who you might recognize as the main character from the recently ended NHK morning drama Beppin-san.\u00a0 In this film, she plays high school student Aoi who lives with her depressed father who is no longer able to maintain his sushi shop.\u00a0 She is weighing different options for her future, including succeeding her father as sushi chef to save the restaurant.<\/p>\n A close second was The Shining Star of Losers Everywhere, the story of racehorse Haru Urara who back in 2003 single-handedly saved a Kochi racetrack with her amazing losing streak.\u00a0 Judging from the chatter at the post-screening reception, it sounded like this film might take the prized NY Japan CineFest Audience Award, decided by those in attendance voting on their favorite film from the lineup.\u00a0 If this has piqued your interest, check out the CineFest’s second night of Animation & Japanese Film Festivals Program<\/a> at Asia Society tonight!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" WIT Life is a periodic series written by professional Writer\/Interpreter\/Translator Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei\u2019s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends along with her own observations. Last night I attended the first night of the 6th annual NY Japan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[53,263,18,36,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-film","category-translatinginterpreting","category-wit-life","category-writers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkZ7m-aML","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41463"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41589,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41463\/revisions\/41589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/wasabi-150x150.jpg\")
<\/a><\/strong><\/em>Last night I attended the first night of the 6th annual NY Japan CineFest 2017 at Asia Society<\/a>.\u00a0 This is one of my favorite cinematic events in the city, as it is a compilation of Japan-related short films.\u00a0 As usual, there were many thought-provoking selections ranging from documentary to futuristic to artistic.<\/p>\n