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The Coca-Colonization of Japan
Shomei Tomatsu has been called Japan’s pre-eminent photographer of the postwar era. In the Review’s November 6 issue, Ian Buruma reviews Chewing Gum and Chocolate, a compilation of Tomatsu’s...
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The Worst Railroad Job
Everett CollectionSessue Hayakawa as a Japanese colonel and Alec Guinness as a British POW forced to work on the Burma railroad in Bridge on the River Kwai, 1957 Christopher Isherwood called it the...
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The Mistress and the Marionette
“The conventional opinion about Egon Schiele’s 1915 portrait of his wife Edith,” writes Ian Buruma in the Review’s April 2 issue, “is that it betrays his romantic disappointment. His wife may have...
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Thailand’s Banned ‘King’
Paul Kolnik/Lincoln Center TheaterKelli O’Hara as Anna Leonowens and Ken Watanabe as the king in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The King and I, 2015 The Thai government has never been fond of The King and...
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A Downpour of Fish: Murakami on Stage
Stephanie BergerNino Furuhata as Kafka and Naohito Fujiki as Oshima in Yukio Ninagawa’s production of Kafka on the Shore at Lincoln Center, 2015 Yukio Ninagawa’s production of Kafka on the Shore at...
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Lost in China’s Exploding Future
Arte France Cinéma/Beijing Runjin Investment/Kino LorberZhao Tao as Tao and Yi Zhang as Jinsheng in Jia Zhangke’s Mountains May Depart, 2015 Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s new movie, Mountains May...
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In the Capital of Europe
François Lenoir/ReutersBelgian soldiers posing for a photograph while patrolling the Grand Place, Brussels, December 24, 2015 1. Brussels has frequently had a bad press. Already in the 1860s,...
View ArticleSplendours and Miseries: Images of Prostitution in France, 1850–1910
In The New York Review of Books, Ian Buruma writes, “The exhibition, organized together with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, is full of wonders, and has a far more serious purpose than some French...
View ArticleMountains May Depart
In the NYR Daily, Ian Buruma writes, “Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s new movie, Mountains May Depart, begins with a disco dance in a bleak mining town to the sounds of “Go West” by the Pet Shop Boys....
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Auschwitz on Trial: The Bully and the Witness
Laurie Sparham/Bleecker StreetTimothy Spall as David Irving in Denial, 2016 In her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, the American academic Deborah E. Lipstadt called David Irving, a British amateur...
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Oscar Wilde’s ‘Living Death’
Oscar Wilde Collection, British Library Archive/British Library BoardOscar Wilde having lunch with Lord Alfred Douglas near Dieppe in 1898, after his release from Reading Gaol The exterior of Reading...
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The Weird Success of Guy Burgess
Popperfoto/Getty ImagesGuy Burgess (right) with the British journalist Tom Driberg, who flew to Moscow after Burgess’s defection to interview him for a biography, August 1956 One of the oddities about...
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Japan: Beautiful, Savage, Mute
Kerry Brown/Paramount Pictures/Everett CollectionAndrew Garfield as the Portuguese Jesuit missionary Father Rodrigues in Silence, Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of the novel by Endō Shūsaku Martin...
View ArticleHe Wasn’t the Shogun
To the Editors: It is surprising that Ian Buruma, who has contributed so much to our appreciation of Japan, makes the error of calling Toyotomi Hideyoshi the shogun [“Japan: Beautiful, Savage, Mute,”...
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The ‘Indescribable Fragrance’ of Youths
Sir Edmund Walker Collection/Royal Ontario MuseumKitagawa Utamaro: The Young Man’s Dream, from the series Profitable Visions in Daydreams of Glory, circa 1801–1802. In this woodcut, Ian Buruma writes,...
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Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017)
Dominique NabokovRobert B. Silvers in his office at The New York Review of Books, early 1980s Bob Silvers, my friend and the editor of The New York Review, died on March 20, shortly after completing...
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The Earthy Glories of Ancient China
Henan Museum, ZhengzhouEarthenware dog, Henan Province, eastern Han dynasty, 25–220 AD French schoolchildren used to be taught that they were descended from the Gauls, a tribe that emerged around the...
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Myth-Maker of the Brothel
Freer|Sackler, Smithsonian/Charles Lang FreerUtamaro: Moon at Shinagawa (detail), 1788–1790 Of all the masters of the woodblock print in the Edo Period, Utamaro has the most colorful reputation....
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Fools, Cowards, or Criminals?
AFP/Getty ImagesNazi leaders accused of war crimes during World War II standing to hear the verdict in their trial, Nuremburg, October 2, 1946. Albert Speer is third from right in the back row of...
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Stray Dog
Daidō Moriyama/Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, ParisPhotograph by Daidō Moriyama from ‘Tokyo Color,’ December 2008–July 2015; included in Daido Tokyo One of Moriyama Daidō’s most famous...
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