Word: okamoto
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...says Mari Miura, associate professor of political science at Sophia University in Tokyo. Japan's female lawmakers are generally seen by voters as kokumin no mesen - ordinary citizens - who have a better understanding of grass-roots issues. "There have been many male-centered policies in Japanese politics," says Eiko Okamoto, a former Yokohama city assembly member who won a seat in the Diet's lower house after serving 14 years in local politics. "I have high expectations that the increase in female legislators will help measures on issues that are more closely related to people's lives" such as education...
...country with a low-hanging glass ceiling, the appearance of so many junior female politicians on the national stage has inevitably generated controversy. Besides Fukuda and Okamoto, members of a freshman class of 26 female DPJ lawmakers include Kayoko Isogai, a temp worker who was unemployed when she stood for election, and Mieko Tanaka, a former secretary and actress who had a small role in an erotic horror film, Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf. The group has been criticized for being little more than pretty faces unqualified to hold public office. During campaigning, some newspapers dubbed them "Ozawa's princesses...
...Though the mural was begun nearly 40 years ago, this week's installation is the first time the work has been seen by the public. A colorful 30-m long painting of 14 panels, Myth of Tomorrow is a remarkable window into the early vision of Okamoto, who died 12 years ago. The struggle of its recovery and restoration over the past two decades is just as memorable. The painting was commissioned for the lobby of a luxury hotel in Mexico City in 1968, but financial problems halted the hotel project, and the finished mural was never displayed. Sometime during...
...specter of the Second World War remained strong as Japan rebuilt itself during Okamoto's painting years in the middle of the last century. Wanting to explore these themes in his own work, Okamoto moved to Mexico, where he felt that the cultural integration of life and death would allow him to do that more freely. When Myth of Tomorrow was commissioned, his secretary and life partner, Toshiko Okamoto, questioned his decision to represent such destructive imagery. "He told her, 'Because it is Mexico, this will work,' " says Akiomi Hirano, Toshiko's nephew and the producer of the Shibuya mural...
...after its initial good reception as a concept, nobody ever saw the finished work. After Okamoto died in 1996 at the age of 84, Toshiko spearheaded a search for the mural. When it was located in September 2003 in a warehouse outside Mexico City, its surfaces deeply cracked from exposure, she made the recovery, restoration and return to Japan of Myth of Tomorrow her last project as director of the Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum. She paid a fraction of the millions of dollars for the painting that Hirano says were spent transporting and restoring it. When it came to bringing...