Tag: Jonathan Clements

July 26, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. “My stay here has been so short,” said Rabindranath Tagore to Japanese students in 1916, “that one may think I have not earned my right to speak to you about anything concerning your country.” Pallavi Aiyar chooses to quote him in the final chapter of her Orienting: An Indian in Japan, a […]

July 12, 2021 · 2 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Struggling to make ends meet, Tsuneo is scrimping together all his spare cash to fund the trip of a lifetime – a graduate posting in Mexico where he can indulge his love of diving. He is so set on this aim that he doesn’t realise that his co-worker Mai is carrying a […]

June 17, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Released as part of a Routledge series of translations of Chinese scholarship, Sun Lijun’s two-volume History of Chinese Animation is the largest work yet published in English on the subject, boasting 572 pages on a century of innovation, tribulation and entertainment in the Chinese cartoon business. The book is unforthcoming about its […]

June 14, 2021 · 0 comments

Asei Kobayashi, who died on 30th May from a heart attack, was an unlikely candidate for musical composer, or actor, or game-show champion…. Pushed by his parents into studying to be a doctor, he transferred without telling them to the department of economics at Keio University, where his classmates included another future composer, Isao Tomita. […]

May 24, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. In 2013, the Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe took the remarkable step of appearing on YouTube to talk about Japanese food. He was addressing the nation, and the world, about Japan’s unique culinary tradition, or washoku, as part of an effort to get it rated as one of UNESCO’s treasures of intangible […]