Get into the Groove

The New York Times featured a hearty preview of this weekend's STEIM events in the Weekend Arts section last Friday which included an interview with STEIM's artistic director, Takuro Mizuta Lippit:

"For 40 years the institute has offered electronic music innovators opportunities to work with designers, engineers and other musicians, Mr. Lippit said. Though Steim artists have visited New York before, Mr. Lippit said it was rare for the whole institution to be represented, as it will be at Japan Society."

We also had a preview feature on Examiner.com that included an interview with Japan Society's own Performing Arts & Film Director, Yoko Shioya, who was quoted saying:

"Put it this way, the layer of the musicians and composers in electric music in Japan is very thick—therefore, many types of musicians emerge…Japanese musicians in this genre have been quite influential in the international music scene."

You can find clips of STEIM's Mobile Touch Exhibition on our YouTube channel and watch as children and adults alike take advantage of the rare opportunity to make their own music on STEIM’s wild collection of invented electronic instruments, including the Finger Web, the Cracklebox, the Voice Scratcher and the Headbanger.

Also, don't forget to check out a video of STEIM's killler performance at Japan Society from May 8th!

It's not only us...

Everyone's getting excited for j-CATION!

Toyota and the Green Car of the Future

Micheline Maynard, senior business correspondent for The New York Times, published "An Apology From Toyota’s Leader" yesterday, noting that, "In his testimony, Mr. Toyoda tried to reassure lawmakers that the company was addressing problems that led to the recalls. In addition, he said, the company was moving to repair its damaged reputation."

Back in October, Maynard held an event here to discuss how many Americans are uncomfortable about the influence foreign companies exert on our economy and to also promote her book The Selling of the American Economy, in which she argues that despite the lingering xenophobia that colors American perception of foreign-owned companies, foreign investments are actually an overwhelmingly positive force.

Plus she's going to be returning at the end of next month to moderate Green Japan Series: The Green Car of the Future, a panel with Thomas Sticker, the Corporate Manager of Energy & Environment Research Group of Toyota North America and panelists from Mercedes Benz and Ford Motors.

While they discuss what the future's green car will look and drive like on the road, it will be interesting to see what kind of an impact Toyota's current conundrum will have on their discussion.

Ramen!

Another food-related post to whet your appetites for j-CATION!

 

This one comes from a fun article in The New York Times entitled Exploring Tokyo Through Its Ramen Shops:

 "Ramenate! is hardly the only ramen blog out there. There are dozens, many in English, many more in Japanese. Together they constitute but one small corner of Tokyo’s sprawling ramen ecosystem, a realm that encompasses multilingual guidebooks, glossy magazines, databases that score shops to three decimal places, comic books, TV shows, movies (like the 1985 classic “Tampopo,” in which a Stetson-wearing trucker helps a beleaguered widow learn the art of ramen) and, according to the Shinyokohama Raumen Museum (yes, there is a ramen museum), the 4,137 shops selling bowls of noodles in broth.

Still unclear? Well, combine New Yorkers’ love of pizza, hot dogs and hamburgers, throw in some Southern barbecue mania, and you’ve still only begun to approximate Tokyo’s obsession with ramen."

Notes from the Gallery

This is your second sneak peak of our upcoming exhibition: Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters: Japanese Prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi from the Arthur R. Miller Collection.

(Missed the first sneak peak? Find it here)

 

The New York Times gave us a shout-out with a short article featuring the new exhibit and they made sure to mention the special treat we have for you. Japan Society is selling prints of the originals showcased at the exhibit! Right now, they're available online in three sizes, framed (in black, gold or espresso wood frames) or unframed, for $75 to $500.

Here's a snippet from The Times:

"The show includes more than 130 works by Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), a master of color woodblock prints — among them, vivid images like that of a warrior stabbing himself in the mouth with a sword and a boy grappling with a giant carp. Thirty-six of those prints, including the one above of a Buddhist monk hiking on a snow-covered mountain, can be purchased as very high-quality digitalized prints, even before the show opens. Although, as Joe Earle, the director of the Japan Society Gallery, noted: “The prints you buy are not the actual size of the ones in the show — some are bigger than the original, and some are smaller. This is to prevent anyone from passing them off as original prints.”"

Book Review: "The Last Train From Hiroshima" and "Edokko"

The New York Times recently published a fantastic review of Charles Pellegrino's sober and authoritative new book, “The Last Train From Hiroshima.” Here are a few interesting excerpts from the article:

"Mr. Pellegrino, whose many previous books include “Ghosts of the Titanic” (he also served as a scientific consultant to the director James Cameron on his Titanic expeditions and on “Avatar”), relates many stories in this book, not only those of wounded survivors but also of American and Japanese pilots and many others.

He pays particular attention to forensic detail, and provides a slow-motion, almost instant-by-instant explanation of how the atom bomb discharged its fury. There is not a lot that is new here, but “The Last Train From Hiroshima” is a firm, compelling synthesis of earlier memoirs and archival material, as well as of the author’s own interviews and research. This is gleaming, popular wartime history, John Hersey infused with Richard Preston and a fleck of Michael Crichton.

This isn’t a book that wrestles deeply with the moral calculus of the decision to drop the atomic bombs. Mr. Pellegrino doesn’t say whether he agrees with Paul Fussell, who wrote in “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb” that “the degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific war.”

But he certainly studies every kind of fallout and does not neglect the spiritual variety. He writes about one doctor who “recalled that those who survived the atomic bomb were, in general, the people who ignored others crying out in extremis or who stayed away from the flames, even when patients and colleagues shrieked from within them.”

This doctor confessed: “Those of us who stayed where we were, those of us who took refuge in the hills behind the hospital when the fires began to spread and close in, happened to escape alive. In short, those who survived the bomb were, if not merely lucky, in a greater or lesser degree selfish, self-centered — guided by instinct and not by civilization. And we know it, we who have survived.” " 

An excerpt of Mr. Pellegrino's book itself can be found HERE.

On a similar note, here at Japan Society, we recently featured author Isaac Shapiro, who was born to Russian Jewish parents in Tokyo in 1931 and grew up in the shadows of war torn Japan. Mr. Shapiro, who went on to become a prominent Manhattan attorney and president of Japan Society, shared the fascinating tale of his Russian/Jewish/Chinese/Japanese childhood in wartime Japan with us on January 14th.

The press release for that event is on our website, if you're interested in learning more.

We made the Times!

"Think of baby animals with spooky, giant eyes and ghosts who talk about their bodily functions. Veith Michel’s three-paneled video features plenty of these, including beautiful line drawings by the manga illustrator Hiroki Otsuka, as well as a barrage of predictable media images.

It is an immersive, at times assaultive, world, especially when paired with a recorded text created by Mr. Wade, Mr. Gradinger and Marcos Rosales that careers from fantastical adventures in outer space to heavy-handed, childlike discussions about the government, consumerism and queer politics.

Mr. Gradinger tends to be subsumed by this environment, which sometimes morphs into an alienating television show for children, full of Andreas Harder’s abrupt lighting shifts. The most successful moments come early on, when his messy, often pedestrian movement palette unspools against the text’s Neverland of shattering space, ninja battles and princesses in need of saving.

Dressed in a loose blue T-shirt and lighter blue shorts printed with rocket ships, Mr. Gradinger seems a lost boy, grinning madly, galloping about or huddling into his body; scooting his rear end across the enclosed white stage; or flipping his hands in troubled little gestures."

[ The New York Times Dance Review ]