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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Toshiro Mifune
Here is the scenario for a movie someone should make. If they can get Toshiro Mifune for it, he'd be terrific as the lead: September, 1945. The war has just…

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Cultural leisure and the rules of its passage
In light clothing, with a backpack on my shoulder in the early morning of the summer month of August, I walked unhurriedly out of the anthracite building of the Kyoto…

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achieve funny

How Samurai’s son Matsuo Basho glorified the Japanese three-song haiku all over the world

Haiku (hoku) remains popular largely due to the fact that it perfectly conveys the subtexts of the funny, allows you to achieve funny understatement – a couple of expressive touches, a reference to the mysterious oriental nature – and the joke is ready. But when the haiku, which was originally called “hoku”, appeared in Japanese culture, his role was just that – comic. But thanks to the poet Matsuo Basho, the haiku genre has risen to the very heights of Japanese art – it turned out that “the haiku space is infinite and can contain the whole world”, in the words of another famous haiku author, or haijin, Masaoka Shiki.

The roots of Japanese poetry, as befits everything that this culture is famous for, go back to the deep past. Continue reading

Secrets of "Japanese Disney": Why Hayao Miyazaki's cartoons are so different from Western
The great master of Japanese animation creates completely unique works. Each of his films immerses the viewer in a separate, fully-fledged world. It seems that outside the frame, its inhabitants…

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Hentai History of the genre (18+)
The appearance and development of hentai, pornographic manga and anime, is largely due to the specifically Japanese cultural and historical attitude to aesthetics and sexuality. Manga and anime in Japan…

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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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