Welcome to NOTEBOOK, a cultural guide to art, design and architecture along with a resource of local news and information in English giving a realistic view of Tokyo and further afield.
Revisiting October
10/03
Kanji "Antonio" Inoki passed away after being diagnosed several year ago with heart disease. He was known for a mixed martial arts contest with Muhammed Ali in 1978 at the Nippon Budokan Hall, and later turned to politics, leveraging his influence to negotiate the release of Japanese hostages and abductees in places like Iraq and North Korea. Writer Yu Miri, a Zainichi writer of Korean and Japanese descent won the 5th Berkeley Japan Prize at an award ceremony in California. Her novel Tokyo Ueno Station follows the story of a laborer from Fukushima who moved to Tokyo in search of world against the backdrop of the 1964 Olympics and the 2020 Olympics Games that came to Japan. The novel champions forgotten and disregarded characters, a tale that still resonates today.
10/04
Swedish researcher Svante Pääbo, based at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan since 2020, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for extracting DNA from 40,000-year-old bones and later unveiling the Neanderthal genome. Meanwhile, the National Film Archive of Japan in Tokyo showcased films made by Kazuhiko Hasegawa and Directors Company, a little known of film production office that ran from 1982 to 1992 and produced Hasegawa's 1979 social satire “The Man Who Stole the Sun” (Taiyō o Nusunda Otoko) starring Bunta Sagiwara as a police officer tracking down the terrorist/High School teacher — played by musician Kenji Sawada — building an atomic bomb to demand the Rolling Stones play Japan.
10/05
North Korean fired a ballistic missile for the first time in 5 years, traveling over Aomori to the north of Japan before landing in the Pacific, 4,500km away. Japan's oldest hot spring Dogo Onsen Honkan in Matsuyama City, Ehime, underwent renovation. It has served as inspiration and for the writer Natsume Soseki and DOGO ONSENART 2022 a festival celebrating Matsuyama hot spring culture with the 'honkan' (or main building) as its centre, wrapped with an enlarged collage of the local landscape, local culture and local history by artist Shinro Ohtake.
10/06
The Crown Prince Akishino attended the 31st Blue Planet Prize award ceremony in Tokyo awarded to the the Fourth King of Bhutan for his promotion of culture and collective happiness along with Professor Stephen Carpenter from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States for his 40-year study of lake ecosystems. In Ehime on Shikoku, the warm waters of the Uwakai Sea, part of Japan's Inland Sea, provide an amply supply of fresh fish. While Ehime's west-facing coastline also provides the right setting for Shikoku’s famed udon. Regular crops of chestnuts and barley are raw ingredients used in making raw yomogi (mugwort) udon, with yomogi grown in the Hijikawa river of Ozu city; tarai udon and ankake-yomogi udon; two Chinese inspired dishes topped with fresh seasonal vegetables.
10/07
Yayoi Kusama's 'Pumpkin' had sat at the end on a pier on the island of Naoshima ever since 1994 before being washed out to sea this summer. After being rescued by locals and then repaired, the sculpture was returned to its former glory. Nearby, the Okayama Arts Summit 2022 entitled “Do we dream under the same sky,” curated by Rirkrit Tiravanija, considered ideas of community and participation as the triennale returned for the first time since 2019 which focused on themes of technology and fiction. The last 3 years were far from being works of fiction and the latest edition aimed to slow things down and return to normal.
10/10
An anchor belonging to a Mongolian ship, part of a fleet attempting to invade Japan in 1281, was recovered from the sea floor off the coast of Nagasaki. Meanwhile, composer and pianist Toshi Ichiyanagi passed away aged 89. He was crucial part of the postwar Japanese avant-garde and worked in theatre and film with painter Jasper Johns, choreographer Merce Cunningham, Toshio Matsumoto and Yoko Ono to name but a few.
10/11
Japan's Megumi Horikawa won the women's 63-kilogram division at the Judo World Championships in Uzbekistan for her first world title, as Taylor Fritz held firm in a pair of tie-breaks at the Rakuten Japan Open Tennis Championships to outlast tour rival and longtime friend Frances Tiafoe in a gripping all-American final. Following the death of Ichiyanagi, we look at several of the twelve films he soundtracked, from “The World of Pulses” (1962) to “Farewell to the Summer Light” (1968), “Atman” (1975), “The Story of Big 1: Sadaharu Oh” (1977) and his final film “Hokai-bito: Ina no Seigetsu” (2011)
10/12
Japan finally removed its cap on daily arrivals and its ban on individual tourism, looking to revive the country’s ailing tourist economy. Tokyo’s newly restored Rikkyo Gakuin Exhibition Hall opened to the general public along with other buildings on the Rikkyo University campus, including the residence belonging to mystery novelist Edogawa Rampo and his storehouse of books next door transferred to the University in 2002 and designated a local cultural asset in 2003.
10/13
Military led authorities in Myanmar sentenced the documentary film director Toru Kubota to a further 3 years on top of a 10-year sentence he received the week before for violating "communication laws". In Japan, with the week yen and relaxed borders, explosive tourism was set to make its way into the country, while noppe stew made use of left-over ingredients and vegetables, especially taro root, providing a hearty, economic alternative best eaten during the autumnal winter months.
10/14
Human remains were discovered in hedgerow beside Osaka's popular amusement park Universal Studios Japan. Thailand's AirAsia carried out its first flight connecting Bangkok with Fukuoka and Kyushu, a new major hub for tourists from South East Asia. A new exhibition of little seen work by Dutch artist Daan van Golden (1936–2017) took place in Tokyo. “Art is the opposite of Nature” at Misako & Rosen gallery presented the painting and photographs by van Golden, examples of his radical "art finding" practice.
10/17
With the number of corporate bankruptcies in Japan up by almost 7% from the previous year to just over 3,000 cases, the first increase in three years, the Toranomon-Azabudai Project in Tokyo was hard at work, reshaping the physical centre of corporate Japan to introduce green space, residential and shopping at the heart of the city. But how will it do all of this in a meaningful way? Time will tell, as the project was due to open in spring 2023.
10/19
A car driven by someone from the Kyoto Association for the Preservation of Ancient Cultures reversed into Japan’s oldest tosu of public bathroom, an important cultural property and part of Kyoto’s Tofukuji Temple. 100 members of the Chinese Dragon gang were involved in a scuffle at a French restaurant on the 58th floor of the Sunshine Tower in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro. Gang-like but not gang-like enough, the group fall outside of organized crime laws and are considered more of a nuisance than a criminal element. Elsewhere, “Small, Slow But Steady” (or Keiko, me o su-masete) directed by Sho Miyake previewed in Berlin earlier this year. Reflecting the main character’s faltered surroundings by shooting on 16mm film, the story was loosely adapted from the novel Don’t Give Up (Makenaide) by Keiko Ogasawara, the first hearing-impaired professional female boxer in Japan.
10/21
Kyoto Experiment, Alternative Kyoto, and Art Collaboration Kyoto were three art events that recently opened with each one exploring the states of things. They combined local culture with technology and asked the difficult question; what can art contribute during periods of austerity?
10/24
A 400 year-old chisel was found hidden within the Hoji building currently being renovated at Daitoku-ji Temple in Kyoto. The week also marked the start of the 35th Tokyo International Film Festival sharing its programme with “Kazuhiko Hasegawa and Director’s Company” and the 90th Anniversary of Toho Studios, both taking place at the National Film Archive of Japan, a festival of New Animated Short films from Japan around the world taking place at Shibuya’s Eurospace cinema in December.
10/26
250 officials from more than 142 countries and regions, as well as eight international organizations gathered to announce their participation in the upcoming 2025 Osaka-Kansai Expo. And as Autumnal weather crept in, fish from Yamato Raku in Shinjuku made the experience of food like kaki (oyster) katsuo tataki (slices of raw seared bonito) age-ginnan (pan-fried ginnan seeds that grow from the ginkyo tree) and sanma-no-kama-meshi (a hot pot of rice and whole mackerel) all the more memorable.
10/28
The purchase of five wooden "Brillo's Box" sculptures by Andy Warhol by Tottori prefecture for almost ¥300 million, bought in preparation for the new Tottori Prefecture Museum of Art opening next year, caused something of a stir in the cash strapped region. Meanwhile, Damian Loeb "Still" at Taka Ishii Gallery and a screening of "Event for Modified Man" (1976) by Australian artist Stelarc at the Keio University Art Center's Mita Campus both probed and amplified the best of what the city had to offer post-lockdown.
10/31
On the eve of Hallowe'en, a world record breaking attempt took place to gather the most number of people with the same name. The group where everyone is named 'Hirokazu Tanaka' even boasted a former pro baseball player amongst its ranks. On the other side of the city, national museums line Ueno Park, the first public park in Japan. One of these is the National Museum of Western Art, designed by French architect Le Corbusier. It recently reopened after several years of renovation restoring the museum to its former glory. Ueno Park was also preoccipied by the arrival of two new panda to Ueno Zoo, celebrating 50 years since the first panda arrived from China to Japan in 1952.
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