Paris Syndrome is Real

Last week I took a two-day trip to Paris for research. This post is my final post relating to the trip (after the posts my visit to the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France), my visit to the Concorde Memorials, my visit to the Paris Catacombs and Photographing Planes at Paris Charles De…

Reflecting on a Research Trip to Paris: National Library of France

Last week I took a two-day trip to Paris for research. There were a number of elements to the trip, and I am going to do a series of posts relating to each of them. The first part of my trip was to visit the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France) to do…

Splitting Atomic Symbolism: Words, Images, and Sounds of a Nuclear World

Last week, I attended the “Hiroshima – Nagasaki – Fukushima – Articulations of the Nuclear. The Case of Japan” Conference at the University of Cologne. It was a fabulous conference and I will do a further post about it. In this post I will say a bit about my presentation. It is planned that a…

“Japan Sinks – People of Hope” – Japan Gets That Sinking Feeling… yet again.

I have previously written a post about the two movie versions of Nihon Chinbotsu (日本沈没) known as ‘Japan Sinks‘ in English. I had studied the two versions discussed in that post for my article about disaster movies. After that I came across an animated version of the story on Netflix (see “Japan Sinks 2020” –…

Book Review: “The Man With The Red Tattoo” by Raymond Benson

Further to reading “You Only Live Twice” by Ian Fleming and inspired by some of what was written by Graham Thomas, a chat we had together and what is on his excellent blog site, I decided to read a James Bond book not written by Fleming. As noted in my review of “You Only Live…

Ho-Ren-So: Japanese workplace mobile instant messaging communication in a social enterprise

Earlier this week I chaired the latest Cardiff-Japanese Lecture Series, this time with Professor Hiromasa Tanaka (Meisei University). This was an engaging webinar and had things that will be useful for my update to Japan: The Basics and my work on Visual Packaging Culture. The topic was “Ho-Ren-So: Japanese workplace mobile instant messaging communication in…

World Book Day – Like the Other 364 Days

Today is World Book Day, a day when we should celebrate books and many children will dress up as characters from favourite books. For me, World Book Day, is not that different to many other days of the year. My life is full of books. I have written before about the significant impact of movies/films…

Hokusai: What Makes Him Popular?

Recently, I attended a seminar on the topic of ‘Hokusai: What Makes Him Popular’ hosted by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation. The main speaker was Alfred Haft, a Project Curator in the Department of Asia at the British Museum, focusing on Japanese art of the Edo period, especially woodblock prints, and Tsuyoshi Tane, is a Paris-based…

The British Media and its Representation of the Japanese

Earlier this month I was involved with the fifth event in the Cardiff-Japanese Lecture Series, this time with Professor Perry Hinton (University of Warwick). This was an engaging webinar and had things that will be useful for my update to Japan: The Basics and my work on Visual Packaging Culture. There were even some bits…

“You Only Live Twice” – Bond Goes To Japan

Having recently read the original novel “You Only Live Twice” by Ian Fleming, I decided to re-watch the film again. At one level, I probably didn’t need to as I’ve seen it so many times, having grown up watching it many times each year as it was one of the few films that we had…

“Minamata” – Fabulous Photography and Telling of a Story that Shouldn’t Need Telling

This week I am leading some seminars at university to do with protest in Japan in the 1960s. It’s not possible to discuss this theme without Minamata and Minamata-byo (usually referred to as “Minamata Disease” although, technically, it is an illness rather than a disease) coming up. It seemed appropriate, therefore, to watch the movie…

Book Review: “You Only Live Twice” by Ian Fleming

Recently I read “Jaws” by Peter Benchley for the first time as, despite the fact that “Jaws” is my favourite movie, I’d never read the book and thought that I should (despite the warnings from many that the book is nowhere near as good as the movie). It seemed appropriate then – though it wasn’t…