Diary

Happy New Year 2011

Happy new year, everyone. Although Heathrow airport destroyed part of my holiday before Xmas, I could finally go to Japan and spend the new year there. For those I had to cancel the appointments, I’m sincerely sorry about that. For those I could meet, thank you for your time and it was a fantastic moment! I went for a drink, onsen trip, movie, a dinner at China town, had osechi, toshikoshi-soba, saw kohaku, heard the sound of joya-no-kane, saw ekiden, and went for new year sale…it was such a rich 1 week. Now, this is a review of 2010. [Tough […]

Art&Exhibitions

Amazing paper cut art works by Rob Ryan

I went to see Rob Ryan’s paper cut art works yesterday.  (via @NoriFla Thanks!) I really liked his fine, crisp but simple work, which has lovely “stories” inside. Sometimes the story is sentimental, sometimes happy, I will never get bored looking at these art. It might be interesting if it becomes animation…like moving pictures. They gave me an invitation card too. Amazing! Unfortunately yesterday was the last day for the exhibition, but seems he has a shop in Shoreditch. Go see it if you are interested in. I’m gonna visit there too! Rob Ryan Website

Theatre

Shun kin at Barbican (2)

Now the main stage, “Shunkin”. It was just fantastic. Probably I can say one of the best stages I’ve ever seen. The story is based on a novel called “Shunkin sho”, written by Junichiro Tanizaki. It’s a story of a blind shamisen player “Shunkin” and a man who takes care of her, “Sakuke”. On this stage, story goes with the narrator who is recording the story for “NHK” programme in the current Japan, and the man in the narrated story who is visiting the grave of Shunkin and Sasuke, and the old Sasuke who talks about his memory of Shunkin […]

Theatre

Shun kin at Barbican (1) Honjo Hidetaro

Okay, the first writing after the re-launch is about the stage “Shun kin” which was performed at Barbican. And this entry is about its pre-show concert by Hidetaro Honjo. I’m afraid I didn’t know his name…but seems he is such a famous Shamisen player. He started it by learning “Nagauta” and “Minyo”. This time, he played some graceful pieces and sang some “Minyo” too. It was very delicate, beautiful tune. There is a lot of different types of Shamisen, but…for example, the powerful sounds of “Tsugaru-shamisen” always gives me energy. And gentle pieces make me remember the cities like Kyoto […]

TV&Films

onedotzero 2010

I went to see onedotzero as usual…however, I missed “J-star” I used to watch every year! No….but here is a quick report anyway. The first one was “Sprites”. It was for kids, and the most of the audience was moms and kids! The works were more “cute” type of stuff. The other one was “Extended Play”. This one was a bit more crazy…but the quality of the images were absolutely amazing! I was feeling really good watching them. By the way, there were some installation as well, one of them was very very interesting. It uses “grids” on the wall, […]

Diary

My blog has moved.

I haven’t written this blog for long time…but actually I was moving it to a new site. I used to use two different blog service for English version and Japanese version, and it was a bit tiresome to update both of them. So I installed WordPress on my own domain, and installed a multi-language plugin. Now I can edit both at the same time. The reason why it took so long to re-launch…I moved everything by hand. I had to integrate two sites into one, but also wanted to check the content. Reading the entries one by one, I checked […]