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Gaijin find traveling in Japan both daunting and welcoming. Try traveling there black and gay, and yet, for some people, it’s America that feels more foreign.

A 6.1 earthquake recently struck Osaka, Japan. In 1997, writer Haruki Murakami walked the long stretch between Kobe’s city center and his childhood home in the outskirts, to see how the great Kobe earthquake changed his hometown. He found not only a foreign landscape, but traces of himself, and the constant echo of violence.

The “War and Postwar: The Prism of the Times” exhibition outside Tokyo shows the way WWII-era photographers collaborated with Japan’s propagandist wartime regime to sculpt the visual perception of Japan. With Japan’s current militant, pro-nuclear government, the exhibit offers an important reminder of artists’ obligations to make work that challenges, rather than perpetuates, the status quo.

With a population of 127 million, Japan has the most rapidly aging society on the planet. Elderly individuals often live in extreme isolation, albeit only a few feet from neighbors on all sides, “trapped in a demographic crucible of increasing age and declining births.” Their fate? A “lonely death” where their body may remain undiscovered […]