1.
Kagoshima Prefecture
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Kagoshima Prefecture is a prefecture of Japan located on the island of Kyushu. The capital is the city of Kagoshima, Kagoshima Prefecture corresponds to the ancient Japanese provinces Ōsumi and Satsuma, including the northern part of the Ryukyu Islands. This region played a key role in the Meiji Restoration, and the city of Kagoshima was an important naval base during Japans 20th century wars and this became known only recently under the Koizumi administration. Kagoshima Prefecture is located at the southwest tip of Kyushu on the Satsuma Peninsula and this prefecture also includes a chain of islands stretching further to the southwest of Kyushu for a few hundred kilometers. The most important group is the Amami Islands, surrounded by the East China Sea to the west, Okinawa Prefecture in the south, Kumamoto Prefecture to the north, and Miyazaki Prefecture to the east, it has 2,632 km of coastline. It has a bay called Kagoshima Bay, which is sandwiched by two peninsulas, Satsuma and Ōsumi and its position made it a gateway to Japan at various times in history. While Kyushu has about 13 million people, there are less than 2 million in this prefecture, the prefecture boasts a chain of active and dormant volcanoes, including the great Sakurajima, which towers out of the Kagoshima bay opposite Kagoshima city. A steady trickle of smoke and ash emerges from the caldera, on active days in Kagoshima city an umbrella is advisable to ward off the ash. Sakurajima is one of Japans most active volcanoes, major eruptions occurred in 1914, when the island mountain spilled enough material to become permanently connected to the mainland, and a lesser eruption in 1960. Volcanic materials in the soil make Sakurajima a source for record daikon radishes, many beaches around the Kagoshima Bay are littered with well-worn pumice stones. A crater lake in the tip of the prefecture, near the spa town of Ibusuki, is home to a rare species of giant eel. Most of the sector is focused in Kagoshima City and the surrounding area. The eastern part of the prefecture, the former Ōsumi Province, is mostly rural, the prefecture has strong agricultural roots, which are reflected in its most well-known exports, green tea, sweet potato, radish, Pongee rice, Satsuma ware and Berkshire pork. Kagoshima prefectures production of bonito flakes is second only to that of Shizuoka, in addition it produces Japans largest volume of unagi eels. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has several facilities within the prefecture, including the main launch facility on Tanegashima. The prefectures gross domestic product is approximately 4.834 trillion yen. League, Kagoshima United FC, a soccer team, was founded in 2014 and competes in the J3 League. High-speed craft route to Ibusuki, Tanegashima and Yakushima, ISBN 0-674-01753-6, ISBN 978-0-674-01753-5, OCLC58053128. Kagoshima travel guide from Wikivoyage Official Kagoshima Prefecture website National Archives of Japan
2.
Japan
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Japan is a sovereign island nation in Eastern Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies off the eastern coast of the Asia Mainland and stretches from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea, the kanji that make up Japans name mean sun origin. 日 can be read as ni and means sun while 本 can be read as hon, or pon, Japan is often referred to by the famous epithet Land of the Rising Sun in reference to its Japanese name. Japan is an archipelago consisting of about 6,852 islands. The four largest are Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku, the country is divided into 47 prefectures in eight regions. Hokkaido being the northernmost prefecture and Okinawa being the southernmost one, the population of 127 million is the worlds tenth largest. Japanese people make up 98. 5% of Japans total population, approximately 9.1 million people live in the city of Tokyo, the capital of Japan. Archaeological research indicates that Japan was inhabited as early as the Upper Paleolithic period, the first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD. Influence from other regions, mainly China, followed by periods of isolation, from the 12th century until 1868, Japan was ruled by successive feudal military shoguns who ruled in the name of the Emperor. Japan entered into a period of isolation in the early 17th century. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan is a member of the UN, the OECD, the G7, the G8, the country has the worlds third-largest economy by nominal GDP and the worlds fourth-largest economy by purchasing power parity. It is also the worlds fourth-largest exporter and fourth-largest importer, although Japan has officially renounced its right to declare war, it maintains a modern military with the worlds eighth-largest military budget, used for self-defense and peacekeeping roles. Japan is a country with a very high standard of living. Its population enjoys the highest life expectancy and the third lowest infant mortality rate in the world, in ancient China, Japan was called Wo 倭. It was mentioned in the third century Chinese historical text Records of the Three Kingdoms in the section for the Wei kingdom, Wa became disliked because it has the connotation of the character 矮, meaning dwarf. The 倭 kanji has been replaced with the homophone Wa, meaning harmony, the Japanese word for Japan is 日本, which is pronounced Nippon or Nihon and literally means the origin of the sun. The earliest record of the name Nihon appears in the Chinese historical records of the Tang dynasty, at the start of the seventh century, a delegation from Japan introduced their country as Nihon
3.
Film director
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A film director is a person who directs the making of a film. Generally, a film director controls a films artistic and dramatic aspects, the director has a key role in choosing the cast members, production design, and the creative aspects of filmmaking. Under European Union law, the director is viewed as the author of the film, the film director gives direction to the cast and crew and creates an overall vision through which a film eventually becomes realized, or noticed. Directors need to be able to mediate differences in creative visions, there are many pathways to becoming a film director. Some film directors started as screenwriters, cinematographers, film editors or actors, other film directors have attended a film school. Some outline a general plotline and let the actors dialogue, while others control every aspect. Some directors also write their own screenplays or collaborate on screenplays with long-standing writing partners, some directors edit or appear in their films, or compose the music score for their films. Film directors create a vision through which a film eventually becomes realized/noticed. Realizing this vision includes overseeing the artistic and technical elements of production, as well as directing the shooting timetable. This entails organizing the crew in such a way as to achieve their vision of the film. This requires skills of leadership, as well as the ability to maintain a singular focus even in the stressful. Moreover, it is necessary to have an eye to frame shots and to give precise feedback to cast and crew, thus. Thus the director ensures that all involved in the film production are working towards an identical vision for the completed film. The set of varying challenges he or she has to tackle has been described as a jigsaw puzzle with egos. It adds to the pressure that the success of a film can influence when, omnipresent are the boundaries of the films budget. Additionally, the director may also have to ensure an intended age rating, thus, the position of film director is widely considered to be a highly stressful and demanding one. It has been said that 20-hour days are not unusual, under European Union law, the film director is considered the author or one of the authors of a film, largely as a result of the influence of auteur theory. Auteur theory is a film criticism concept that holds that a directors film reflects the directors personal creative vision
4.
Waseda University
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Waseda University, abbreviated as Sōdai, is a large, private university with a main campus located in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan. First established in 1882 as the Tōkyō Senmon Gakkō or Tōkyō College by Ōkuma Shigenobu, the university consists of 13 undergraduate schools and 23 graduate schools. Waseda is one of the group of universities assigned additional funding under the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science. Waseda consistently ranks among the most academically selective and well-regarded universities in Japanese university rankings, in international rankings, published by Quacquarelli Symonds weighted towards academic peer review and published research output, Waseda ranked 212th in 2015/16. The university was founded by samurai scholar and Meiji-era politician and former prime minister Ōkuma Shigenobu in 1882 and it started as a college with three departments under the old Japanese system of higher education. In 1882, the university had the department of science and economics, law. Along with these departments, an English language course was established, three years later, the department of physical science was closed because it had too few applicants. The department of science and engineering was established in 1908, the department of literature was established in 1890. The department of education was established in 1903, and the department of commerce, much of the campus was destroyed in the fire bombings of Tokyo during World War II, but the university was rebuilt and reopened by 1949. It has grown to become a university with two senior high schools and school of art and architecture. In June 12,1950, Sixty police raided Waseda University, the open letter to MacArthur was one read at a Communist-sponsored rally a week earlier. A police official said most meetings at Waseda would be banned in the future because political elements might try to utilize them. Yuichi Eshima, Vice-Chairman of the Students Autonomy Society, said the police action stupified students and professors, Waseda University started its life as Tōkyō Senmon Gakkō on October 21,1882. It was renamed Waseda University on September 2,1902 upon acquiring university status, Ōkuma had long desired to create an academic cap so distinctive that someone wearing the cap would immediately be identified as a Waseda student. The chief tailor of Takashimaya, Yashichiro, was called upon to design a cap in three days. Each square cap was stamped on the inside with the name, his department, the school seal. Thus, the cap served as a form of identification, the cap, with its gold-braided badge, is registered as a trademark. On October 21,2007, Waseda University celebrated its 125th anniversary, Ōkuma often talked about the 125 years of life theory, The lifespan of a human being can be as long as 125 years
5.
Shochiku
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Shochiku Company Limited is a Japanese movie studio and production company for kabuki. It also produces and distributes anime films and its best remembered directors include Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse, Keisuke Kinoshita and Yōji Yamada. Shochiku has also produced films by highly regarded independent and loner directors such as Takashi Miike, Takeshi Kitano, Akira Kurosawa, the company was founded in 1895, which makes it the oldest company in Japan involved in film production. The name was changed in 1937 to the reading of Shōchiku. The company began making films in 1920, about a decade after its main rival Nikkatsu, renaming itself “Shochiku Kinema”, the company sought to break away from the prevailing pattern of jidai-geki and to emulate Hollywood standards. It was the first film studio to abandon the use of female impersonators and brought new ideas, including the star system and the sound stage to Japan. It built its main studio at Kamata, between Tokyo and Yokohama, and hired Henry Kotani, an American-born Japanese who had worked in Hollywood as an actor to direct its first film, “Island Woman”. With the reopening of its Kamata studios, Shochiku also introduced the shomin-geki genre and these dramas proved immensely popular, and marked the start of the careers of many prominent directors and actors. In 1931, Shochiku released the first “talkie” made in Japan, The Neighbors Wife, the following year, Shochiku Kinema was merged with its parent company, Shochiku Entertainment, and adopted the new name of Shochiku Corporation. During the war years, Shochikus President, Shiro Kido, helped establish the Dai Nippon Eiga Kyokai, from the mid-1930s until 1945, the films produced by Shochiku and other Japanese movie companies were propagandistic. After the Surrender of Japan, Kido and Shochikus co-founder Otani were arrested and charged with Class-A war crimes by the Allied occupation authorities. In 1953, after the end of the Occupation, Kido returned to Shochiku, directors associated with Shochiku in this era included Ozu, Keisuke Kinoshita, Noboru Nakamura and Hideo Oba. Many of the films during the 1950s were aimed primarily at female audiences, in particular, Hideo Oba’s “What is Your Name. ” was the most commercially successful film of the period. By the start of the 1960s, Shochiku’s films were criticized as “old-fashioned” with the popularity of rival Nikkatsu’s Taiyo-zoku youth-orientated movies, Shochiku continued to maintain its family-orientated audience largely due to the phenomenal success of the Otoko wa Tsurai yo series directed by Yoji Yamada from 1969 through 1997. However, with the death of its star Kiyoshi Atsumi, the series came to an end, and the company faced increasing financial difficulties. The Ofuna studio was transformed into a theme park, Kamakura Cinema World, but this was closed in 1998. Since that time, Shochiku has relied on its film studio, yoji’s “The Twilight Samurai” was nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Language Picture. Shochiku has also served as a distributor of theatrical anime. as of October 2015 Kabuki-za Theatrical Corp.3. 44% Mizuho Corporate Bank,3. 22% Asakusa International Theater, media related to Shochiku at Wikimedia Commons Shochiku Co. Ltd
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Mikio Naruse
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Mikio Naruse was a Japanese filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer who directed some 89 films spanning the period 1930 to 1967. Naruse is known for imbuing his films with a bleak and pessimistic outlook and he made primarily shomin-geki films with female protagonists, portrayed by actresses such as Hideko Takamine, Kinuyo Tanaka, and Setsuko Hara. Because of his focus on drama and the intersection of traditional and modern Japanese culture. His reputation is just behind Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Ozu in Japan and internationally, among Naruses most revered films are Late Chrysanthemums, Floating Clouds, and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. Akira Kurosawa called Naruses style of melodrama, like a river with a calm surface. Mikio Naruse was born in Tokyo in 1905, for a number of years he worked at the Shochiku film company under Shiro Kido as a property manager and later as an assistant director. He was not permitted to direct a film at Shochiku until 1930, in 1933, he quit Shochiku, and began working for Photo-Chemical Laboratories. His first major film was Wife and it won the Kinema Junpo, and was the first Japanese film to receive theatrical release in the United States. The film concerns a woman whose father deserted his family many years before for a geisha. In the war years, Naruse went through a breakup with his wife Sachiko Chiba. Naruse himself claimed to have entered a period of depression as a result of this. In the postwar period he collaborated with others more often, less frequently writing his own scripts, when a Woman Ascends the Stairs tells the story of an aging bar hostess trying to adapt to modern times. Scattered Clouds was his last film, and is regarded as one of his greatest works, a tale of impossible love between a widow and the driver who accidentally killed her husband, it was made two years before his death. Naruse is known as particularly exemplifying the Japanese concept of mono no aware, the awareness of the transience of things, Naruse was shy and few of his closest collaborators knew him well. Hideko Takamine, who starred in a dozen of his films remembered ven during the shooting of a picture, he would never say if anything was good, or bad and he was a completely unresponsive director. I appeared in about 20 of his films, and yet there was never an instance in which he gave me any acting instructions, Naruses films contain simple screenplays, with minimal dialogue, unobtrusive camera work, and low-key production design. His protagonists were usually women and his studies of female experience spanned a range of social milieux. A number of films were adaptations of a single novelist, Fumiko Hayashi
7.
Toho
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Toho Co. Ltd. is a Japanese film, theater production, and distribution company. It has its headquarters in Yūrakuchō, Chiyoda, Tokyo, and is one of the companies of the Hankyu Hanshin Toho Group. Other famous directors, including Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Masaki Kobayashi, Tohos most famous creation is Godzilla, who features in 29 of the companys films. Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah, Mechagodzilla, and Rodan are described as Tohos Big Five because of the numerous appearances in all three eras of the franchise, as well as spin-offs. Toho has also involved in the production of numerous anime titles. Its subdivisions are Toho-Towa Distribution, Toho Pictures Incorporated, Toho International Company Limited, Company Limited, and Toho Music Corporation & Toho Costume Company Limited. The company is the largest shareholder of Fuji Media Holdings Inc, Toho was created by the founder of Hankyu Railway, Ichizo Kobayashi, in 1932 as the Tokyo-Takarazuka Theater Company. It was known as the Toho Theatre from the late 1960s until the 1970s, Toho also had a theater in San Francisco and opened a theater in New York City in 1963. The Shintoho Company, which existed until 1964, was named New Toho because it broke off from the original company, the company has contributed to the production of some American films, including Sam Raimis 1998 film, A Simple Plan. Detective Conan, Captured in Her Eyes Pocket Monsters, Lord of the Unknown Tower – Entei Godzilla vs. Takao vs. Godzilla, Mothra, Mechagodzilla, doraemon, Nobitas Space Heroes Assassination Classroom Crayon Shin-chan, My Moving Story. Godman Warrior Of Love, Rainbowman Meteor Man Zone Ike, jenny Belle and Sebastian Igano Kabamaru Touch Kimagure Orange Road Godzilla Midori Days Psycho-Pass Yowamushi Pedal Akame ga Kill. Blood Blockade Battlefront My Hero Academia Three Leaves, Three Colors Little Witch Academia In more recent years and for a period, one of their first video game was the 1990 NES game titled Circus Caper. Later, they followed with a series of games based on Godzilla and it also published games such as Super Aleste. They even worked with Bandai on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, released in Japan in 1988, Tohos headquarters, the Toho Hibiya Building, are in Yūrakuchō, Chiyoda, Tokyo. The company moved into its current headquarters in April 2005, tohoScope Tomisaburo Wakayama Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men - The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda, Peter H. Brothers. Toho Studios Story, A History and Complete Filmography Stuart Galbraith IV Official website Official Tohos YouTube channel, Toho Pictures official website TOHO-TOWA Company, Limited official website TOWA PICTURES Company, Ltd. official website Toho at Anime News Networks encyclopedia
8.
Japanese Communist Party
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The Japanese Communist Party is a political party in Japan and is one of the largest non-governing communist parties in the world. The JCP advocates the establishment of a society based on socialism, democracy, peace, the JCP is one of the largest non-ruling communist parties in the world, with approximately 320,000 members belonging to 22,000 branches. In the wake of the Sino-Soviet split, the party began to distance itself from the Socialist Bloc, especially from the Soviet Union. It polled 11. 3% of the vote in 2000,8. 2% in 2003,7. 3% in 2005,7. 0% in the August 2009 election and 6. 2% in 2012. In recent years its support has accrued, as of the 2014 General Election it won 21 seats, the JCP took 7,040,130 votes in the constituency section and 6,062,962 in the party lists. This continues a new wave of support that was evident in the 2013 Tokyo metropolitan election where the party doubled its representation. As of 1 January 2014 the JCP has approximately 320,000 members, following the partys advancement in the 2013 Tokyo prefectural election there has been an increase in membership growth, with over 1,000 people joining in each of the final three months of 2013. Approximately 20% of new members during this period were aged 20–40, the JCP was founded on 15 July 1922, as an underground political association. Outlawed at once under the Peace Preservation Law, the JCP was subjected to repression and persecution by the military and it was the only political party in Japan that opposed Japans involvement in World War II. The party was legalised during the U. S. occupation of Japan in 1945, in 1949, the party made unprecedented gains. It won 10 percent of the vote and sent 35 representatives to the Diet, but early in 1950, the Soviet Union sharply criticized the JCPs parliamentary strategy. Stalin insisted that the JCP pursue more militant, even violent, SCAP seized this occasion to engineer the Red Purge, which forced the party leaders underground. Then, after the Korean War broke out, the party staged some acts of terrorism or sabotage and this resulted in a loss of popular confidence. Through the end of the decade, it never won more than three percent of the votes or two seats in the Diet, even so, its strong support among many intellectuals gave it a relatively greater importance than these numbers suggest. The party did not take sides during the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, in the mid-1960s, the U. S. State Department estimated the party membership to be approximately 120,000. Lam Peng Er argued in Pacific Affairs in 1996 that the JCPs viability is crucial to the health of Japanese democracy and this, he says, is because, It is the only established party in parliament that has not been coopted by the conservative parties. It performs the role against the ruling parties without fear or favor. More importantly, the JCP often offers the only candidate in prefectural governorship, city mayoral
9.
Cecil B. DeMille
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Cecil Blount DeMille was an American filmmaker. Between 1913 and 1956, he made a total of 70 features and he is acknowledged as a founding father of the cinema of the United States and the most commercially successful producer-director in film history. His films were distinguished by their scale and by his cinematic showmanship. He made silent films of every genre, social dramas, comedies, Westerns, farces, morality plays, DeMille began his career as a stage actor in 1900. He later moved to writing and directing stage productions, some with Jesse Lasky, DeMilles first film, The Squaw Man, was also the first feature film shot in Hollywood. Its interracial love story made it a hit and it put Hollywood on the map. The continued success of his productions led to the founding of Paramount Pictures with Lasky and his first biblical epic, The Ten Commandments, was both a critical and financial success, it held the Paramount revenue record for twenty-five years. In 1927 he directed The King of Kings, a biography of Jesus of Nazareth, the Sign of the Cross was the first sound film to integrate all aspects of cinematic technique. Cleopatra was his first film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, after more than thirty years in film production, DeMille reached the pinnacle of his career with Samson and Delilah, a biblical epic which did an all-time record business. Along with biblical and historical narratives, he directed films oriented toward neo-naturalism. He went on to receive his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director for his circus drama The Greatest Show on Earth and his last and most famous film, The Ten Commandments, is currently the sixth-highest-grossing film of all time, adjusted for inflation. He was also the first recipient of the Golden Globe Cecil B, DeMille Award, which was later named in his honor. There are several variants of DeMilles surname and his familys Dutch surname was originally spelled de Mil and then became de Mille. As an adult, he adopted the spelling DeMille for professional purposes, the family name de Mille was used by his children Cecilia, John, Richard, and Katherine. DeMilles brother William and his daughters, Margaret and Agnes, as well as DeMilles granddaughter, Cecilia de Mille Presley, Cecil Blount DeMille was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts, while his parents were vacationing there, and grew up in Washington, North Carolina. His father, Henry Churchill de Mille, was a North Carolina-born dramatist and lay reader in the Episcopal Church and his mother was Matilda Beatrice DeMille, whose parents were both of German Jewish heritage. She emigrated from England with her parents in 1871 when she was 18, Beatrice grew up in a middle-class English household. DeMilles mother was related to British politician Herbert Louis Samuel, DeMilles parents met as members of a music and literary society in New York
