Patrick St. Michel

Makoto Shinkai’s animated film, newly released in North America, is a magical and ultimately optimistic coming-of-age story that taps into the country’s unique anxieties.

Movies from South Korean, China, and Japan have become increasingly nationalistic, thanks to ongoing territorial disputes and the 70th anniversary of World War II.

Tokyo gets into communal bawling.

Ahead of hosting the 2020 Summer Olympics, the country is ramping up government-sponsored efforts to promote its culture abroad.

"Gross" characters are proliferating in a country known for kawaii, and now even local governments' mascots are trying to out-weird one another.

Zany contests have fallen out of style—even as the Western image of "crazy" Japanese TV seems to be ramping back up.

She's not the first to coax diehards into buying multiple copies of the same song. The practice is standard in Japan, for reasons that increasingly apply in U.S. pop music.

The country's unique social history and its current financial state have inspired a boom in pop-culture throwbacks to the end of the 20th century.

What Minami Minegishi's fall from grace says about gender relations in Japan.