Author Archives: philipbrasor

Media watch: Welfare payments decrease despite inflation

Posted on December 21, 2022 by philipbrasor

The welfare ministry’s main task with regards to public assistance is to make sure individuals who receive government funds due to financial difficulties are not taking undue advantage of the system. Consequently, the rationale behind public welfare in Japan isn’t … Continue reading →

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Media watch: Bad conditions for technical interns persist

Posted on December 18, 2022 by philipbrasor

Despite the negative press that Japan’s overseas technical interm program has received in recent years, nothing about it has changed in any way. According to NHK, in fiscal 2021 there were more than 23,000 formal complaints made to the Organization … Continue reading →

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Review: Tomorrow Morning

Posted on December 17, 2022 by philipbrasor

It’s impossible to underestimate the aspirational power of movies. The popularity of Hollywood cinema during the Depression was due to its ability to remove people from the anxiousness of their everyday lives for a few hours, usually by presenting characters … Continue reading →

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Review: Never Goin’ Back

Posted on December 16, 2022 by philipbrasor

This seems to be the season in Japan for delayed releases of American comedies set in Texas and centered on female characters. Though I think Support the Girls, which came out here two months ago, is a better movie, Never … Continue reading →

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Number 1 Shimbun December

Posted on December 15, 2022 by philipbrasor

Here is our media column for the December 2022 issue of Number 1 Shimbun, which is about the media’s lack of scrutiny over the government’s push for a much larger defense budget.

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Review: Blind Ambition

Posted on December 15, 2022 by philipbrasor

Robert Coe and Warwick Ross’s subtly effective documentary about four Zimbabwe emigrants to South Africa walks a careful line in explicating the men’s difficulities in adjusting to new lives in a place fraught with risks for outsiders—doubly so in a … Continue reading →

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“2046,” October 2004

Posted on December 11, 2022 by philipbrasor

The movie reviews I wrote for the Asahi Shimbun between 1996 and 2010 are not available on the internet, so I am slowly trying to add them to this blog. Someone once said that it wasn’t until Wong Kar Wai’s … Continue reading →

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Review: A Year-End Medley

Posted on December 9, 2022 by philipbrasor

I’ve never been a big fan of holiday movies, whether they’re Christmas-, Hannukah-, Thanksgiving-, or New Years-themed. There’s something a bit too circumscribed about them, and the effort to maintain a contextual holiday “spirit” is, I find, dispiriting. This Korean … Continue reading →

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Media watch: Starting deadline for paying back COVID loans approaches

Posted on December 5, 2022 by philipbrasor

One of the government’s countermeasures to address the economic hardship caused by COVID-19 was interest-free loans, called tokurei kashitsuke, for households whose income had dropped appeciably due to the pandemic. Though these kinds of loans have always been available, the … Continue reading →

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Review: Pictures of the Old World

Posted on December 4, 2022 by philipbrasor

Filmed in 1972 but not released until 1988 due to censorship by the communist Czechoslovakian government, this documentary by filmmaker Dusan Hanak qualifies as the Slovakian cognate of Griel Marcus’s description of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes as a window into … Continue reading →

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