Immediately after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, many began to imagine a physically and conceptually transformed Tokyo. While we may be nowhere near the end of the slow-motion train wreck that is Covid-19, imagining a post-pandemic Japanese society that can benefit citizens is the beginning of revitalization, and hopefully, a more substantial set of transformations.
This exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, held from November 2019 to March 2020, featured more than a hundred projects, and provided a window from which to contemplate the changes that are developing right now due to the advances in AI, biotechnology, robotics, and AR.
Japan gave Taiwan manga, anime, and KTV. Taiwan is now returning the favor with bubble milk tea.
A 27-year-old transgender woman who has spent the last nine months in custody at the Shinagawa Detention Center is claiming that her human rights are being violated, on both counts related to her sexual minority status.
With the Tokyo Olympics just around the corner and Japan opening its doors to foreign workers than ever before, it would seem that the nation should also be ready to show its omotenashi towards its growing foreign community. But judging by Osaka Prefecture’s grossly inept handling of changes to its Native English Teacher (NET) Program and its treatment of its foreign workers, grave doubts are warranted.
Artist Chiharu Shiota is Japanese, and deeply so, but at the same time she lives a very international life. Her installations and performances address hot issues that question exile, displacement, identity, sickness, and all their respective boundaries of fear and anxiety.
With the keen media attention and the escalating response from governments around Asia and beyond, it would not be unreasonable for a large section of the public to feel quite afraid of the Wuhan Coronavirus, but what researchers are discovering is a level of threat to human health which may not be much greater than the seasonal flu.
A law firm in Yokohama is refusing to return the personal documents, including passport, college transcript, and college graduation certificate, of a 30-year-old Filipino woman because of a contract she signed for her employment in Japan.
Sports journalist Scott McIntyre, just released from 44 days of detention for trespassing into his parents-in-laws apartment complex, describes the conditions he endured as being tantamount to “torture.”
Sections of the Hiroshima Army Clothing Depot (ACD), some of the few remaining buildings that bear the marks of the August 6, 1945, atomic bombing of the city, are scheduled to be torn down despite the opposition of concerned citizens’ groups.
