Dance - Hosotan Butoh (Tatsumi Hijikata, 1972)

Live Music Show - Classic Japanese Pop & Psych

The swinging pop and psychedelic sounds of 60s Japan!

Curated by The Sadnesses

Total Runtime: 0:34:41

The Spiders
The Mops
The Golden Cups
J-Girls
Akiko Nakamura
The Tigers
The Black
Yuya Uchida and the Flowers
Koyama Rumi
The Blue Comets
Mayuzumi Jun & The Ox
5 Girls
Performance sequence from War of the Gargantuas (1968)

8th Man - The Battle of the Brothers

8th Man is considered Japan's earliest cyborg superhero and this anime is said to be the inspiration for Robocop

Curated by The Sadnesses

Total Runtime: 0:23:29

8th Man

8th Man is a fictional manga and anime superhero created in 1963 by science fiction writer Kazumasa Hirai and manga artist Jiro Kuwata. He is considered Japan's earliest cyborg superhero, predating even Kamen Rider (the same year, Shotaro Ishinomori created Cyborg 009), and was supposedly the inspiration for RoboCop.

The manga was published in Weekly Shōnen Magazine and ran from 1963 to 1966. The anime series, produced by Eiken with the TCJ Animation Center, was broadcast on Tokyo Broadcasting System, and ran from November 17, 1963 to December 31, 1964, with a total of 56 episodes (plus the "farewell" special episode, "Goodbye, Eightman").

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_Man

Art - Yayoi Kusama: Self Obliteration (1967)

the queen of dots!

Curated by Markus Fiedler

Total Runtime: 0:23:30

(1967)

Art

Yayoi Kusama (草間彌生 or 草間弥生 Kusama Yayoi^?, born March 22, 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture) is a Japanese artist whose paintings, collages, soft sculptures, performance art and environmental installations all share an obsession with repetition, pattern, and accumulation. (She has described herself as an "obsessive artist".)

Kusama's work is based in Conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism,surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. Kusama is also a published novelist and poet, and has created notable work in film and fashion design. She has long struggled with mental illness.

On November 12, 2008 Christies New York sold a work by her for $5.1 million, a record for a living female artist.^{[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yayoi_Kusama}

Doc - Honda Today (1967)

Groovy 1967 advertising film made for Honda in 1967

Curated by The Sadnesses

Total Runtime: 0:27:58

Docs60shondajapanmotorcycles

Honda Motor Company, Ltd. is a Japanese public multinational corporation primarily known as a manufacturer of automobiles and motorcycles.

Honda has been the world's largest motorcycle manufacturer since 1959, as well as the world's largest manufacturer of internal combustion engines measured by volume, producing more than 14 million internal combustion engines each year. Honda surpassedNissan in 2001 to become the second-largest Japanese automobile manufacturer. As of August 2008, Honda surpassed Chrysleras the fourth largest automobile manufacturer in the United States. Honda was the seventh largest automobile manufacturer in the world behind Toyota, General Motors, Volkswagen AG, Hyundai Motor Group, Ford, and Nissan in 2010.

Honda was the first Japanese automobile manufacturer to release a dedicated luxury brand, Acura, in 1986. Aside from their core automobile and motorcycle businesses, Honda also manufactures garden equipment, marine engines, personal watercraft and power generators, amongst others. Since 1986, Honda has been involved with artificial intelligence/robotics research and released their ASIMO robot in 2000. They have also ventured into aerospace with the establishment of GE Honda Aero Engines in 2004 and theHonda HA-420 HondaJet, scheduled to be released in 2012. Honda spends about 5% of its revenues into R&D.

Dance - Hosotan Butoh (Tatsumi Hijikata, 1972)

Stunning dance piece by the inventor of the dance form known as Butoh

Curated by The Sadnesses

Total Runtime: 0:09:59

70sbutohdancejapan

Tatsumi Hijikata (March 9, 1928 - January 21, 1986) was a Japanese choreographer, and the founder of a genre of dance performance art called Butoh. By the late 1960s, he had begun to develop this dance form, which is highly choreographed with stylized gestures drawn from his childhood memories of his northern Japan home. It is this style which is most often associated with Butoh by Westerners.

Movie - Black River (Masaki Kobayashi, 1957)

Delicate story about post-war Japan's social evils, and the burdens of war

Curated by Jason Forrest

Total Runtime: 1:46:24

Movieblack and whitedramajapankobayashi

Black River (黒い河 Kuroi kawa^?) is a 1957 Japanese film directed by Masaki Kobayashi. The story follows a university student who moves into an apartment building and becomes involved with a waitress. The landlord then attempts to evict the tenants and sell the building through illicit means. The film was screened at the 2005 New York Film Festival in a theatrical retrospective celebrating the Shochiku Company's 110th year.

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http://mubi.com/topics/directors-cup-film-analysis-black-river-1957-dir-masaki-kobayashi

“In any era, I am critical of authoritarian power.” – Masaki Kobayashi

Very few figures in cinema during WWII were as delicate and, at the same time, profoundly expressive as Masaki Kobayashi. As a director, the portrayal and apparent exposé of his country’s atrocities formed Kobayashi’s reputation as an undisguised manifestation of integrity and brutal honesty. His films exist not only serve as reminders but as unyielding indicators to the forces of human capability. Moving towards this grand idea of ultimate, unbiased perception, his work gradually matured and progressed; displaying a more aggressive focus on clarity amidst his fiction as time went on.

With Black River, this vision is pronounced rather acutely through a unique look at a certain post-war US Air-Naval base in Japan. The coexisting lives of the G.I.’s and Japanese heightened the intensity of life during a difficult transition after the war. The atmosphere is heated, both metaphorically and literally, as a singular motif—an umbrella—establishes both mood and theme. The symbolic nature of the film is that of security and comfort, or lack thereof, and; as the core characters seek shelter from the hurricane of gang violence, economic troubles and forlorn yet irresistible love, they are unable to do so, and so must linger—surrounded—with no protection to shield them from the storm. This adversity will lead to Kobayashi’s status as one of the most imperative filmmakers in Japanese cinema.