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    Masahiro Shinoda, Leading Light of Japan’s New Wave Cinema, Dies at 94

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    His films tapped into the fantasies of disgruntled youth by embracing brazen sexuality and countercultural politics. But unlike his peers, he did not shun tradition.Masahiro Shinoda, a leading director of the postwar Japanese New Wave whose films, notably “Pale Flower” and “Double Suicide,” fused pictorial beauty and fetishistic violence, died on March 25. He was 94.His production company, Hyogensha, said in a statement that the cause was pneumonia. It did not say where he died.In the 1960s and ’70s, Japanese New Wave cinema, like its French predecessor, tapped into the fantasies of disgruntled youth by embracing brazen sexuality and countercultural politics, with a tinge of nihilism. But unlike his peers, Mr. Shinoda refused to shun tradition. Instead, he used feudal-era theatrical forms like Noh, Bunraku and Kabuki to recount how cycles of violence have persisted since imperial Japan. His films were wrought with poetic imagery — hooded puppeteers, striking femmes fatales (including his wife, the actress Shima Iwashita) — but for all their sensuality, they espoused the idea that nothing really matters.“Culture is nothing but the expression of violence,” Mr. Shinoda said in an interview with Joan Mellen for her book “Voices From the Japanese Cinema” (1975), adding that “human tenderness is unthinkable without violence.”From left, Ryo Ikebe, Mariko Kaga and Takashi Fujiki in “Pale Flower” (1964), Mr. Shinoda’s best-known film.ShochikuWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Japanese Engineering Transformed Pop Music

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      On the morning of Monday, Aug. 18, 1969, during the last set of the Woodstock festival, Jimi Hendrix wielded a white Stratocaster to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” His guitar solo was one psychedelic peak in a long heritage of experimentation. Almost as soon as guitars were first amplified in the 1930s, musicians began messing with their equipment to create brash tones — from poking holes in speaker cones to increase distortion to plugging into a Leslie speaker, which had horns rotating in a hefty refrigerator-size wooden enclosure, the resulting Doppler effect making the guitar sound rich and otherworldly. More

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      How Ozu Created His Own Cinematic Language

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      The greatest filmmaker of postwar Japan found a new way to show life onscreen.MONO NO AWARE, a phrase that translates to “the pathos of things,” or something like “the beauty of transience,” has been a key aesthetic principle of Japanese art and philosophy for centuries. In the films of Yasujiro Ozu, the most famous of which are quiet domestic dramas set in Tokyo after World War II, that feeling is often manifested in what critics have come to call pillow shots: Every so often, the camera cuts away from the main action to a nearby object — a tree stirred by wind, a vase near a moonlit window, a passing train. It isn’t usually the case that a character in the movie is meant to be seeing that object at that moment, as another director might imply. Rather it’s the filmmaker who’s gently guiding our perspective away from the action, reminding us of the material world that persists outside of the story’s concerns. Ozu once spoke in an interview about deliberately leaving “empty spaces” in his movies as a means of revealing “the hidden undercurrents, the ever-changing uncertainties of life.” More

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      Monsters Plague Japan. But What Do They Mean?

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      How ancient history and modern calamities have cultivated a national obsession with menacing creatures.HIROSHIMAON A BLUSTERY afternoon last November, I stood on the esplanade of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park listening to the solemn gong of the Peace Bell as English and American tourists rang it again and again. A traditional Japanese bell made of oxidized metal, it has a pendular log that strikes at the atomic symbol engraved on its side as if to banish that evil from the earth. A few feet away, a group of Japanese schoolboys stood laughing and gamboling, hanging on each other as schoolboys do everywhere. More

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      How Japanese Superfans Redefined What It Means to Be Obsessed

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      Otaku, people for whom hero worship is a way of life, have changed everyone’s relationship to the culture.ON ANY GIVEN night, the neon-lit streets of Akihabara, an entertainment district in central Tokyo, are packed with visitors. Inside windowless shopping malls, they flock to stalls selling used Hello Kitty or Astro Boy figurines, Pokémon trading cards and vintage video game consoles. At the idol bars and theaters — venues dedicated to musical acts like AKB48, which was named after the area — they wave glow sticks in colors that correspond to their favorite performers. And at the maid cafes, they pay to take pictures with young waitresses in petticoats and pinafores, many of whom hope to become stars themselves one day. Since the Japanese anime boom of the past few decades, Akihabara has been a refuge for the otaku — someone who would “go beyond the lengths of any normal person to pursue their interests,” according to the 2004 documentary film “Otaku Unite!” Kaede, 29, a member of F5ve, a girl group based on the 1990s manga series “Sailor Moon,” calls the neighborhood their “holy land.” More

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      The Darker Side of Japan’s Love of Cuteness

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      From Hello Kitty to Pikachu, the country changed what the world considers adorable. But do these characters represent joy — or rage?To accompany this essay, three Japanese artists created (and named) seven mascots exclusively for T, all inspired by or representing The New York Times in some way.HELLO KITTY STANDS on the balcony like Eva Perón, framed by two great stone pillars and a blue-green dome. At least theoretically she is standing: Save for the round, claw-free paws on the balustrade, she is all giant head, white as a lit-up lamp with sun ray whiskers and the slash of a red ribbon at her left ear, mouthless, her eyes wholly pupils. This little girl — she is not a cat, although not not a cat either (more on this in a bit) — presides over an exhibition at the Hyokeikan, part of the Tokyo National Museum complex in the city’s Ueno Park, celebrating her 50 years of existence and global domination. More

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      Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Environmental Music Is Enchanting a New Generation

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      The Japanese musician, who wasn’t widely known before his death in 2003, has become a beacon for listeners on YouTube and beyond.When listeners discover the Japanese musician and visual artist Hiroshi Yoshimura for the first time, the experience is often a revelation. “I noticed how it activated everything,” said Dustin Wong, the experimental guitarist. “It was extremely generous.”Patrick Shiroishi, the inventive Los Angeles-based instrumentalist, called Yoshimura a “god-level composer and musician who sits with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Christian Vander and John Coltrane and Bela Bartok for me. They are so themselves.”Yoshimura released most of his gentle and reflective albums of kankyō ongaku, or environmental music, during the 1980s and ’90s. A descendant of Erik Satie’s furniture music and a cousin to Brian Eno’s ambient explorations, Yoshimura’s work put more of an emphasis on melody and warmth than its Western contemporaries. His compositions are often grounded by a soothing, vibrating hum underscoring largely electronic notes that fall like a pleasant weekend rainstorm. The spaces he created in his minimal, synthesizer-laden compositions allowed sounds from the outside world to exist harmoniously within the pieces. It’s music that doesn’t demand too much of your attention, but rewards close listening.During his lifetime, Yoshimura remained a relatively obscure figure to those outside Japan. In recent years, his global audience has grown significantly, thanks in part to a series of reissues that have brought his music to streaming platforms for the first time. The latest, “Flora,” arrived on Thursday, the first day of spring, in a fitting tribute to how devotion to Yoshimura’s music and philosophy continues to bloom.As contemporary listeners seek relaxing or meditative sounds, YouTube’s algorithm has turned unofficial uploads of Yoshimura albums like “Wet Land” and “Green” into favorites.Nuvola Yoko YoshimuraMany of Yoshimura’s recordings were created to be played at specific sites, like the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, or inside a range of prefabricated homes. “Flora” is a bit of mystery within his catalog. It was released only on CD in 2006, three years after his death at 63, from skin cancer. The scant information Yoshimura left behind about it included only its title, the song names and that it was from 1987 — the year after he released two of his most beloved collections, “Surround” and “Green.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yasuaki Shimizu, a Japanese Sax Master, Takes North America

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      The composer and saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu is at home in free jazz, classical and art pop. Finally touring North America, he’s going big by staying small.Halfway through “Bye Bye Kipling,” Nam June Paik’s mash-up of music and video graphics from 1986, the camera pans to a tenor sax player as he leaps through “Tribute to N.J.P.” with its composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto, behind him on piano, conjuring a blend of Shostakovich and Keith Jarrett.The two musicians had joined Paik’s project, which was simultaneously broadcast from New York and Tokyo, to help rebut Rudyard Kipling’s line, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”The twain meets again this week, when that saxophonist, Yasuaki Shimizu, embarks on his first North American tour, starting at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, Thursday and Friday, before going on to Chicago, Toronto, California and Seattle. And on Saturday, at the Metrograph theater on the Lower East Side, Shimizu will introduce four films that he scored, including “Bye Bye Kipling.”For a musician whose inventive arrangements of Bach and whose TV and movie scores have made him a minor celebrity in Japan, the tour is long overdue. (He last performed in the United States in the 1970s.)Shimizu at work in Kanagawa. Kentaro Takahashi for The New York TimesA career retrospective, it should give audiences a taste of Shimizu’s wide-ranging music. He has recorded some 40 albums in as many years — starting in the late 1970s with slick fusion boogie and progressive rock — and has been a prized sideman in the electronic and improvised scenes. With most of his recordings still out of print in the States, he has remained something of a cult figure here.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Japanese Oscar Contender ‘Black Box Diaries’ Isn’t Being Shown in Japan

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      Shiori Ito’s searing indictment of Japan’s justice system in handling sexual assault cases is nominated for best documentary feature at Sunday’s Academy Awards.A film by a Japanese woman about her search for justice from uncooperative authorities after she reported being raped is a contender at Sunday’s Academy Awards. Yet, despite being the first full-length documentary made by a Japanese director ever nominated for an Oscar, the movie cannot be seen in her home country.In the film, “Black Box Diaries,” the journalist Shiori Ito tells the story of what happened to her after she reported being raped at a hotel by a prominent television journalist and the ordeal she says she experienced with Japan’s justice system.The film, which is up for best documentary feature, premiered in January 2024 at the Sundance Film Festival. It was released in U.S. theaters in October and can currently be seen or is slated to be shown in over 30 countries. However, those do not include Japan.The Japanese subsidiary of a major streaming service declined to distribute the film in early 2024, the filmmakers said, and theaters have so far displayed little interest in showing it. The prospects for the film’s release grew even murkier in October when Ms. Ito’s former lawyers and other previous supporters, including fellow journalists, spoke up against her, saying she had used footage without the consent of people in it.Ms. Ito with the producers of “Black Box Diaries,” Hannah Aqvilin and Eric Nyari, at the Oscars nominees dinner in Los Angeles on Tuesday.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesThis is not the first time that Japan has balked at showing unflattering films that were well received in Hollywood. “The Cove,” a documentary about a dolphin hunt in the town of Taiji, and “Unbroken,” a feature film about cruel treatment of Allied prisoners during World War II, both opened at least a year after their U.S. premieres. “The Cove,” which was made by an American director, won the Oscar for best documentary feature in 2010.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More