@ Singapore 2015
Posts
On to Singapore for The Singapore Writers Festival & NUS
Roland Kelts US/Japan Roland Kelts is featured in the following SWF event(s): THE JAPANESENESS OF THINGS 31 Oct, Sat 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM TAH, Kumon Blue Room FESTIVAL PASS EVENT UNRAVELLING HARUKI MURAKAMI 1 Nov, Sun 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM TAH, Chamber FESTIVAL PASS EVENT NEW JAPAN RISING: VOICES FROM THE EDGE 1 Nov, Sun 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM TAH, Kumon Blue Room FESTIVAL PASS EVENT
Monkey & Murakami in Manila, in the Philippines Inquirer
Want to satisfy your Murakami and manga cravings? Check out Monkey Business Japan Foundation, Manila hosts a forum on the new literary journal, with contributing editor Roland Kelts and artist Satoshi Kitamura talking about what makes Japanese literature and popular culture click HARUKI Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto are familiar names in Japanese contemporary writing to Filipinos and the West, more familiar perhaps to the younger generations nowadays than, say, the modern writers such as Yukio Mishima, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, Kobo Abe, Shohei Ooka, Shusaku Endo and the Nobel laureates Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburo Oe. Older lovers and readers of Japanese fiction and literature may say Filipinos should read the modern writers more (Ooka, for one, wrote the celebrated “Fires on the Plain,” about Japanese soldiers in the Visayas during the Second World War; and Endo, who wrote the novel “Silence,” which no less than Martin Scorsese himself is adapting into a movie, tackled overtl
On Japan's "ghost homes," first column for the New Statesman
Out with the old: the ghost homes of Japan Japan’s shrinking population has produced a different kind of housing problem. By ROLAND KELTS I recently visited Aizuwakamatsu, a rural rice-farming region in northern Japan. The scenery was storybook Asia: precipitous hills, dense with greenery, dipping into narrow-cut rice paddies hedged by brooks and streams. At the onset of dusk one evening, our minivan rounded a hillside overlooking the Tadami River. A cluster of homes emerged through the mist, pastel green, pink and pale blue roofs huddled on a patch of land jutting from the shore. With the mountains mirrored in the water surrounding it, the village looked as though it were floating. One of the local guides told me that the coloured roofs were made of tin or aluminium, covering or entirely replacing the original thatchwork, an icon of traditional Japanese architecture. Upkeep had become too expensive, and the risk of fires or snow collapses too much for elderly inhabitants
Thank you, Manila!
At Ayala Museum, Makati City, Manila, Philippines. (photos Japan Foundation, Manila)
On the death of Japan's game industry, for The Japan Times
Localization: Has Japan lost the plot? By ROLAND KELTS Japan once ruled and defined the global gaming industry. In the arcade age, Japanese developers gave us “Pac-Man,” “Space Invaders” and “Donkey Kong.” In the era of physical consoles: “Metal Gear Solid,” “Snatcher,” “Final Fantasy” and “Silent Hill.” Japan’s creative use of technology, physical design and narrative whimsy once made it the only country in the world that consistently delivered interactive pleasures via buttons and joysticks. But as veteran American translator, localizer and voice director Jeremy Blaustein reminds me, that was a very long time ago. Since then, the Japanese gaming industry has grown increasingly marginal in the global market. Costs have soared, technologies advanced exponentially and the Americans overtook the business. Speaking at the Tokyo Game Show in 2009, game creator Keiji Inafune was unequivocal: “Japan is over,” he said. “We’re done. Our game industry is finished.”
Reviving Japan by restoring its homes, for The Journal
Minka: a tale of friendship and renewal [photos courtesy of Craig Mod and Yoshihiro Takishita] By Roland Kelts To residents of the seaside tourist town of Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, it’s known as “the house on the hill”—an 18th century Japanese minka farmhouse perched atop Genjiyama, one of the town’s highest elevations. Rumored through the years to be the villa of a former prime minister, the sanctuary of an ocean-worshipping religious cult, even the refuge of a disgraced foreign leader, it is in fact a nearly 300-year-old wooden edifice moved there in the 1960s from the rural Japanese prefecture of Gifu. The farmhouse was painstakingly rebuilt, restored, and modernized by two men: the late American Associated Press journalist John Roderick and his adopted Japanese son, Yoshihiro Takishita. Today, it’s one of the most beautiful monuments to traditional Japan that is more than just a relic.