Carey Hiroyuki Tagawa
Carey Hiroyuki Tagawa is a Hollywood actor, Japanese by birth, who became famous for his work in the films Pearl Harbor, Memoirs of a Geisha, Hachiko: The Most Faithful Friend.…

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What is modern popular music in Japan?
The concept of modern Japanese pop music in a broader sense also refers to Japanese rock music, which is why many Japanese rock musicians rank some of their work as…

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What is the secret of the Japanese rock garden
The mystery of the disappearing fifteenth stone is, perhaps, the first thing the European has associated with the traditional Japanese “dry” garden. However, neither the "invisible" stone, nor "Mount Fuji",…

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beings standing

JAPAN’S POSTAL MARKS

Her Majesty Postage Stamp! It is a unique invention in itself. And she appeared at the behest of the time. Rather – at the behest of economic progress.

The vigorously developing capitalism of the mid-19th century, industry, trade, transport, or, as they say now, “business”, needed a connection. Moreover, the communication is well-established, reliable, and, most importantly, publicly available, convenient and cheap. And this, I think, predetermined the fact that for the first time a postage stamp appeared in Great Britain, which had become by that time a powerful colonial power, a “workshop of the world”, a “world cab driver”, and a “world banker.” And the communication system that existed in the country at that time was cumbersome, expensive and required streamlining.

In 1837, a member of the House of Commons of the British Parliament, inventor and educator, Sir Rowland Hill published his project “Post Office Reform, its Importance and Feasibility”. In his work, he proposed to unify the postage Continue reading

ANIMATION OF CELESTIAL COLOR

In search of explanations of actual reality, social researchers are increasingly turning to the analysis of media products. The history of this interest is closely connected with the development of the ideas of modern Marxists (neo-Marxists), who justified and proved that the media and mass culture, among other functions, contribute to the establishment and maintenance of the ideology of ruling groups.

One of the most dynamically developing research areas on this basis is visual research, the focus of which, for more than two decades, has been in cinema, design, television, advertising, including in connection with the analysis of various forms of sexuality presented there. At the same time, animated cinema, which traditionally refers to the sphere of childhood, where the topic of sexuality is not yet relevant, often remains outside the scope of researchers’ attention, which in our Continue reading

MASAHIRO YASUDA AND HIS THEATER “YAMANOTE”

With this pensive, phlegmatic (as it seemed to me when I first met) man I first met in the summer of 2000, during the Moscow Theater Olympics. Having put Meterlinka’s Blue Bird at his Yamanote Theater in Tokyo, he wanted to talk with one of the Russian theater specialists and find out how Stanislavsky’s performance at the Moscow Art Theater looked like. Translator Yukiko Kase, a very nice girl who graduated from the philological faculty of Moscow State University here in Moscow and defended her dissertation on Gogol’s work, called me and asked for a meeting.

The day we spent partly at my home, analyzing the little that we managed to get about the Mkhatov’s “Blue Bird” (sketches of costumes and scenery, photographs, memoirs of the participants), partly in the Kuskovo park, the summer cottage of Count Sheremetyev.

Communication was intense. The percentage of questions Yasud asked was many times greater than the percentage of questions I asked him. Therefore, it will be more accurate to determine the nature of our conversation as his questions and my monologues. And the subjects of interest were such that, when satisfied, they meant global calculations and they Continue reading

did not leave Russia without an emperor
Satsumi rebellion shocked Japan. For almost 8 months of 1877, an untitled aristocracy led by the samurai Saigo Takamori occupied part of Kyushu Island. Anti-government sentiments were unusually strong in…

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Did Jesus really escape execution, get married and live in Japan: Museum in the village of Shingo
650 km north of Tokyo you can find the tiny village of Shingo, which locals consider the last refuge of Jesus Christ. Allegedly among the quiet hills of this place…

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Anime and Manga as Contemporary Art in Japan
What is anime and manga? The simplest definition looks like this: Manga are Japanese comics. Anime is a Japanese animation. It is often believed that the terms “manga” and “anime”…

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