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“I like to dance when I am cutting into the woodblock images of dancers. I feel that I am doing each gesture myself.” Those are the words of Naoko Matsubara, a Japanese born, Canadian based printmaker. Her 1975 work ‘Maiko’, a colour woodblock print on paper, captures the graceful movement of a trainee geisha as […]
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Late last year, the Japanese government’s chief spokesperson announced that the country will restart its commercial whaling program in July 2019, putting it at odds with a global moratorium on the practice. The news was met with widespread condemnation, and rightly so, but in a way, I support this announcement. To understand my position, we […]
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The importance of free time and calm spaces has been frequently emphasised in recent times, often against the backdrop of anxiety that the world is ‘speeding up’; that is, becoming busier and more digitally controlled. As a result, much research has been done into the effectiveness of art as a form of mindfulness. A 2014 […]
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Image Credit: Hannah Kentridge Hannah Kentridge is a 21-year-old, 4th year undergraduate at Pembroke College, Oxford, studying Oriental Studies and specialising in Japanese. She has been making YouTube videos since she was thirteen and has over 60,000 subscribers. Many of her videos are either in Japanese or include Japanese subtitles. Some of her most popular […]
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Image credit: Louis Thomas- Description-A plate of sushi Until recently, I foolishly assumed that once you go beyond Oxford Castle there is just the train station and then a blank space on the map labelled ‘here be dragons’. However, it turns out instead that here be affordable Japanese food. Inside, Sushimania is very modern and […]
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The infamous capsule hotel. Everyone’s heard of those little pods into which people cram themselves in an effort to save space and money. I too was one of those people on a recent trip to Japan, curious about what exactly a ‘capsule hotel’ entailed. I imagined rows upon rows of capsules packing the building, and […]
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I’m a big fan of Wes Anderson’s work, I won’t lie. Bearing that in mind, I approached the cinema for his latest, Isle of Dogs, with a lot of hope and yet some trepidation. Would he have lost his touch with his 9th film? Flashbacks to watching The Darjeeling Limited, a film that was undeniably […]
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Noise, light, energy. The skyscrapers shimmer with neon and exuberant sky-high manga figures; the streets resound with the cheerful thunder of anime and J-rock; hype seeps from every concrete pore. You know when you’re in Akihabara, Tokyo’s ‘Electric City’, the heartland of all things stereotypically otaku – video games, anime/manga, computers. Wandering through the […]
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Over the summer, I was given the opportunity to visit both China and Japan, as a first-time visitor in both cases – working in China on an internship at Lenovo, and in Japan as a journalist, tasked to write about ‘intriguing aspects’ of the country. The relationship of the two countries will clearly be an […]
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In politics, human life ironically seems to be of little interest; the response of the USA and Japan to the UN resolution outlawing nuclear weapons last week served as a painful confirmation of what years of raging against Western history textbooks, with their shockingly brief allusions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had made me suspect. The […]
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Towards the end of Trinity term 2016, the two of us received a slightly strange email to the OxStu Editor gmail account, from a man who introduced himself as follows – ‘My name is Keisuke Saito, from the Prime Minister’s Office of Japan.’ Spam alert – so we thought. But as we read on, we […]
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When I arrived in the far northern Japanese town of Teshio, I was initially struck by two things: one was the warmth of the people, and the other was the remoteness of the place that I had found myself in. Teshio has a population of under 4000 people and sits near the northern tip of […]
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On the 11th March 2011 at 14:46 JST, an earthquake struck Japan off the Pacific coast of Tohoku, in Northern Honshu, triggering a massive tsunami and the now-famous meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The earthquake, known as Higashi Nihon Daishinsai (the Great East Japan Earthquake) was the most powerful to hit Japan […]
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If you grew up some time between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, chances are you remember watching a particular type of Japanese anime (animated series) on TV. What we thought of as simply ‘Naruto’ or ‘Dragon Ball Z’ in fact came from a grand anime tradition known as ‘shōnen’ (meaning ‘few years’; i.e. anime […]
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In a bid to put my English degree to good use and rekindle my love affair with East Asia, in the summer of 2015, I embarked upon a 7 week teaching programme in Japan. From the mountainous bowls of octopus and copious amounts of sushi thrown my way, to the rampant gambling slot machines and […]
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There is a popular phrase in Japan called “the nail that sticks out its head gets hammered”, a mantra enforcing pack mentality which becomes clearer and clearer to me every day. Inside my classroom the young students thrive on memory games but meet me with glares when asked to put their hands up or perform […]
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If you’ve ever been to Japan, you might have noticed that the country places a strong emphasis on its four seasons, and with good reason: every season in Japan has distinct characteristics that set it apart from other seasons. This means that people wanting to visit Japan will inevitably face the question, when is the […]
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“Think of all the tales you’re going to discover…” Arriving on the B-T stage this 7th week is ‘As I Crossed A Bridge of Dreams’, a new adaptation of an 11th century Japanese text. This play includes the elements of what student drama does best: it has an original score, a new script and includes […]
Continue ReadingThis weekend the Pitt Rivers Museum’s most recent special exhibition, Surviving Tsunami, has closed. The exhibition featured visual material from an on-going conservation project in Rikuzentakata, in northern Japan, where the 2011 Tsunami destroyed two museums and a library. These libraries had held valuable photographs documenting life in the Tohoku region of Japan over the last century. […]
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