Vitro NasuIconoclastic Incubator
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Japanese Literature Scholar, Translater Donald Keene died at 96.
Akutagawa Hiroshi, Mishima and Donald Keene
Mishima (his final performance)
His autobiography is an excellent read.. what an amazing life.
Keene Observation 
(On his 84th birthday)
Interesting review of his book by Colin Marshall.. Donald Keene on Familiar Terms.
Kiki Kirin 
Josh Parmer posted on FB a sad and shocking news that Kiki Kirin (樹木 希林) passed away. (See a great photo of Kiki there)
May your body rest and your soul soar Kiki Kirin. You have been one of my favorite actresses since I first saw you back in Still Walking.
Interview with Kiki
Kiki Kirin’s response here.
Regarding the afterlife, there is the Buddhist idea of rebirth. Right now, my soul is in this body and this body is Kirin Kiki. After this body is used up and death comes around, that soul and spirit moves on and reappears. I don’t see death as an end.
Kiki with Nagase (Previous post)
Koreeda and Kiki (Shoplifters won Palme’dor at Cannes – 2018)
Previous Cannes festival.
Kiki, for whom After the Storm is her fifth Koreeda film, described the director as among one of the most observant she has seen in her 55-year career.
(Franco Zeffirelli, Olivia Hussey and Akira Fuse)
Olivia Hussey and Fuse Akira
Building Bloc -積木の部屋 (積木の部屋 / 布施明)
Flamenco guitar and hear him singing (Youtube)
1)Cyclamen Fuse’s early hit song.
2)
Playing Oboe..
Cyclamen his early hit.
Fuse’s interpretation of Aznavour song in Japanese
(An elegant calligraphic note is a poem written by Fuse Akira)
Happy birthday Leonard Bernstein!
Shinobu Hashimoto and Akira Kurosawa (made history with Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Ikiru)
Obit – shinobu-hashimoto-dies-at-100
Screenwriter for Rashomon dies – (deadline)
(Samurai Rebellion directed by Kobayashi, screenwriting by Hashimoto)
How to Marry a Millionaire – (2015 Acrylic by Tomoo Gokita)
Chloe Sevigny, Kazumi Hayashi, Lily Ludlow, and Tomoo Gokita)
Tomoo Gokita “PEEKABOO” exhibition opening and after party at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo
On view until June 24th, 2018 at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, 3 Chome-20-2 Nishishinjuku, Shinjuku, Tokyo.
Tomoo Gokita Mary Boon Gallery
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The Shoplifters wins Palme d’Or.
Japan Times – Kore eda, Master of Humanism
Winners at Cannes here.
Palme d’Or: “Shoplifters,” Hirokazu Kore-eda
Grand Prix: “BlacKkKlansman,” Spike Lee
Jury Prize: “Capernaum,” Nadine Labaki
Special Palme d’Or: “The Image Book,” Jean-Luc Godard
Best Actress: Samal Yeslyamova, “Akya”
Best Actor: Marcello Fonte, “Dogman”
Best Director: Pawel Pawlikowski, “Cold War”
Best Screenplay (tie): Alice Rohrwacher, “Happy as Lazzaro” & Nader Saeivar, “Three Faces”
Camera d’Or: “Girl,” Lukas Dhont
Short Film Palme d’Or: “All These Creatures,” Charles Williams
Queer Palm (Feature): “Girl,” Lukas Dhont
Queer Palm (Short): “The Orphan,” Carolina Markowicz
Kore eda Films from previous posts.
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Still Walking
Nobody Knows
Film Quiz + Nobody Knows + Cities & Neglected Children
Previous Cannes festival.
Kiki, for whom After the Storm is her fifth Koreeda film, described the director as among one of the most observant she has seen in her 55-year career.
Met Museum (Click on + to see Meng Jia Loses His Hat (left); The Chinese Poet Su Shi (right))
Ike No Taiga:Influence of the Middle Kingdom and humble background
Ike No Taiga :True View (Japan Times) travel painter.
‘The Genius of Ike no Taiga: Carefree Traveler, Legendary Painter,” at Kyoto National Museum, is magisterial. Edo Period (1603-1868) Kyoto teemed with big name painters, but Taiga (1723-1776) was superlative.
Yojimbo -( Kurosawa, cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa )
Sansho Dayu (Kenji Mizoguchi, cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa)
Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa)
At MoMa calendar
Kazuo Miyagawa: Japan’s
Greatest Cinematographer
Through April 29
The Museum of Modern Art
Kazuo Miyagawa (Japan Society)
Born in Kyoto on 25 February 1908, he was introduced at the age of 12 to the art of Sumi-e, a style of ink wash painting in which the dilution of the ink and the mastery of the brush allows the artist to obtain every possible shade of grey. Miyagawa would later state that “it was my training in ink wash painting that really taught me how to see.”
See more AFCinema
Kenji Mizoguchi (on the chair), Miyagawa (behind) and actresses on the set of his film “Street of Shame (Akasen Chitai)
Ayako Wakao 
with Michio Kogure..from Sisters of Gion.
Irezumi 
(Directed by Yasuzo Masumura)
Miyagawa filmed Ayako Wakao in Ozu’s Floating Weed, Gion’s Sisters.
Floating Weeds 
Ozu Yasujiro and Kazuo Miyagawa
Anonymous source 
Another of Miyagawa’s masterful achievements was on Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad (1965), where he supervised 164 cameramen, who used 234 different lenses to capture the dramatic intensity of competition in extreme close-up.
Tokyo Olympiad – Kon Ichikawa
Yayoi 
Yayoi Kusama with one of her Infinity Net paintings in New York, c. 1961 (repost)
(via)
George Clooney was customized by Yayoi Kusama
Photographed by Emma Summerton, Clooney is decked out in a Giorgio Armani suit, shirt, bow tie, and shoes that are all customized by the artist Yayoi Kusama. According to the accompanying W article, the Japanese artist admitted to not being familiar with who the Hollywood star was.. (2013 – old news)
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Kusama and Joseph Cornell New York 1971
In 1972, American assemblage and collage artist Joseph Cornell died. Twenty-six years her senior, Cornell had been Kusama’s closest friend. New York was by this time home to a community of Japanese artists, but Kusama had avoided the associations many of her compatriots formed with groups such as the anti-art happening bunch in the neo-Dada group Fluxus.
“I had gone to New York to be independent,” she says, “Not to join a group.”
Cornell’s death left Kusama dangerously isolated, and her mental condition began to deteriorate. She experienced frequent hallucinations and bouts of severe depression and developed heart problems. Heeding her parents entreatments, Kusama returned to Japan. Her father died two years later, and despite out-patient psychiatric treatment, Kusama’s anxiety neurosis was now unmanageable. In 1977 she entered the psychiatric institution.
Kusama has lived in the same hospital for over 20 years. There is no furniture, save a bed. Her 12 square-meter room has a big, French-style bay window that looks out onto a small garden. Kusama sometimes watches people playing tennis in a court that lies behind the garden.
Every morning after breakfast, Kusama walks five minutes up Gaien Higashi street to her studio to paint. She walks back to the room for lunch, then returns to her studio and works through the afternoon. Kusama takes her dinner at the hospital before retiring each evening.
“It’s very comfortable, very private” says Kusama, “And very simple, I like it.”
Yayoi Kusama loves 
pumpkins and polka dots
Takuma Nakahira – Okinawa (Japan Times)
This solitary figure was the late Takuma Nakahira, then at the height of his influence as both a photographer and radical cultural critic, and now revered together with Daido Moriyama as an originator of the are-bure-boke (rough, blurry, out-of-focus) style of black-and-white photography associated with the turbulent urbanization and political activism of late 1960s Japan.
For a Language to come (MoMa – Takuma’s photos for the 1971 Paris Biennial)
Takuma Nakahiro (Pinterest)
Daido Moriyama
Nakahira started out as an editor for a left-wing journal in the mid-’60s, but left this post to help organize a major historical survey of Japanese photography at the invitation of photographer Shōmei Tōmatsu. As he transitioned into being a full-time photographer in the late ’60s, often collaborating with Daidō Moriyama and the poet-playwright Shuji Terayama, Nakahira sought to test photography’s capacity to engage with and incite critical thought.
Shuji Terayama (born on Dec 10) – he was Pencil Dracula
Klaus Kinski was directed by Terayama see more photos and video here)
Patriotism written, directed and acted by Yukio Mishima
Kishi Keiko on the left and Jean Cocteau on the right
John Nathan and Donald Richie on Yukio Mishima (Youtube)
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Mishima – A Vision of the Void – by Marguerite Yourcenar.. (Photo of Mishima by Hosoe).
Hijikata, Mishima, Hosoe, Tomatsu Donald Richie (see more photos here)
R.I.P Yukio Mishima Nov 25, 1970.
Going to school 
Japan Studies – Chozick
But by age nine, Mishima abandoned transvestitism, noting that: ‘it was tacitly required that I act like a boy. The reluctant masquerade had begun’ (Confessions, 27)
The Tragic Life and Death of Yukio Mishima
Yukio Mishima had a darker side: tormented in his youth by a disturbed grandmother with aristocratic pretensions, shamed by his overbearing father into hiding his early work..
Paul Schrader directing Mishima, A Life in 4 Chapters, his sister in law acted as his interpreter with Japanese crew and actors.
His brother Leonard knew Mishima.
Akutagawa Hiroshi, Mishima and Donald Keene
(via)
Yayoi
Yayoi Kusama with one of her Infinity Net paintings in New York, c. 1961
Tokyo B
Yayoi Kusama at Tokyo Bay 1993
Both photos (via Red List)
Yayoi Kusama banned journalists from her studio.
