Samurai stories, an essential genre of Japan’s film industry since its inception, have been enjoying a global resurgence lately. FX and Disney’s smash-hit period series Shogunproduced by and starring veteran Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada, became the most honored drama in Emmys history last month, winning in more categories in a single year than any show […]
This article is an on-site version of our FirstFT newsletter. Subscribers can sign up to our Asia, Europe/Africa or Americas edition to receive the newsletter every weekday. Explore all of our newsletters here Good morning. In today’s news: The Trump campaign tries to stem the fallout from the Madison Square Garden rally China’s Luckin Coffee […]
In its deliberate pacing and thoughtfulness, Daihachi Yoshida’s new film Teki Cometh is characteristic of the Japanese filmmaker’s career. The feature, which has its world premiere at the 2024 Tokyo International Film Festival, and is competing in the festival’s main competition, is yet another literary adaptation from a director who is an avid reader. “Right […]
Japan has been baseball-obsessed for generations, but Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani‘s first World Series is powering the game to unseen levels of popularity in the country. The second game of the World Series between the Dodgers and the New York Yankees attracted an average of 15.9 million viewers in Japan, around 12 percent of […]
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain As global temperatures continue to rise, countries in South Asia have experienced increasingly severe heat waves that pose unique challenges to workers—both indoors and outdoors—in the tropical belt. As early as April this year, many cities in India, including its capital, New Delhi, set record-breaking temperatures above 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Heat […]
If there were an AI prompt behind Indonesian action maestro Timo Tjahjanto’s latest Netflix movie The Shadow Straysit would probably go something like this: “Give me John Wick but make it Indonesian women with uzis and samurai swords — and more brutal.” Not that anything feels remotely artificial about the viscerally kinetic setpieces that explode […]
Shibuya, a Tokyo district of seemingly perpetual redevelopment and shimmering skyscrapers crammed with offices, shops and eateries; the sort of place that makes it is easy to forget that poverty exists in Japan. Perhaps an ideal location for a screening of The Ones Left Behind: The Plight of Single Mothers in Japana documentary that tackles […]
Netflix subscribers will soon be able to stuff their faces with a second helping of the popular cooking competition series Culinary Class Wars. The streamer revealed Tuesday from Seoul that it has renewed the hit Korean show for a second season. Similar in format to Netflix’s Korean reality hit Physical 100, Culinary Class Wars follows […]
Singapore has selected director M. Raihan Halim’s Malay-language comedy-drama La Luna as its submission for the 2025 Academy Awards in the best international feature film category. The film, a co-production between Singapore and Malaysia, is a comedy about a woman who opens a lingerie shop in a conservative Malaysian village, tackling themes of tradition versus […]
Miracle in Cell No. 7an Indonesian remake of the 2013 comedy-drama directed by South Korea’s Lee Hwan-kyung, will get a sequel and an animated series adaptation by Indonesia’s Falcon Pictures, after the first film achieved major box office success in 2022, scoring fifth in the country’s all-time box office rankings and selling 5.8 million movie […]
