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The Gaijin Ghost

A photoblog, where you become the phantom foreigner, exploring travel destinations in Japan.
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Shin Godzilla statue in front of the Tokyo Midtown Hibiya shopping complex in Central Tokyo.

Movie-Lover's Guide to Japan (Portfolio)

April 27, 2024

The 100 links in this post represent six years’ worth of freelance writing from a cinephile and Japanophile’s perspective. Here, you’ll find Japan-related film analysis and film-related travel writing that I’ve done for /Film, Inverse, Dread Central, Explore, and GaijinPot, including my Lost in Translation and Anthony Bourdain sightseeing guides, which respectively ranked as the #1 and #7 top-performing articles by organic search on the GaijinPot Blog the year they posted.

If you like movies and you’re interested in Japan, the links here offer a comprehensive guide to movie locations in Tokyo and elsewhere across the country. They also serve as the portfolio of a writer with press-accredited coverage of the Tokyo International Film Festival.

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Tags film-lover's guide to japan
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What It's Like to Stay in the Hotel Where 'Lost in Translation' Was Filmed

August 31, 2018

If you read last month’s blog entry, then you’ll know that The Gaijin Ghost is now a married man. When all is said and done, my wife and I will have enjoyed a honeymoon in three stages. The third and final stage will come when we take a trip to Florida next year, so she can meet my parents and sister in person for the first time (having only seen them on Skype or Facetime until now). If all goes well, we should be able to stay in the Sunshine State for about a week and visit Walt Disney World with my family.

The first and second leg of our honeymooning world tour already came this month, however, when we spent a night at the world’s oldest hotel in Yamanashi and spent another night at the Park Hyatt Tokyo, the 5-star luxury hotel where Lost in Translation was filmed.

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Tags film-lover's guide to japan
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The Dual Nature of Rodriguez in Martin Scorsese's 'Silence' (With Photos of the Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum in Nagasaki)

March 28, 2018

In the film Silence, the character of Rodriguez, played by Andrew Garfield, exists simultaneously as a Christ figure and a Judas figure. The most pronounced instance of him being framed as the former is when he sees his reflection morph into the face of Christ while drinking from a stream. Yet like the movie itself, even this scene opens up a prism of interpretations if you mark it as an allusion to the Greek myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image as mirrored in a pool of water.

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Tags film-lover's guide to japan
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Omoide Yokocho, Shinjuku's 'Memory Lane,' and the Question of Tokyo's Real Influence on 'Blade Runner'

October 29, 2017

Tourists, even locals of the right persuasion, often invoke the movie Blade Runner when talking about Tokyo. Director Ridley Scott’s 1982 science fiction film is full of evocative images, some of them clearly Japan-inspired, like that of a geisha popping pills on a giant advertising screen above a rain-drenched neon metropolis. Our first introduction to Rick Deckard, the film’s main character, played by Harrison Ford, comes outside a noodle bar, whose elderly counterman beckons him with Japanese greetings, like “Irasshai,” and “Dozo.” But to what extent, really, did Tokyo inspire the look of Blade Runner?

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Tags kabukicho, shinjuku, film-lover's guide to japan
The main hall of Hanazono, a Shinto shrine in Shinjuku, Tokyo, whose bells are said to be the inspiration for the face of the Disney character Baymax.

The main hall of Hanazono, a Shinto shrine in Shinjuku, Tokyo, whose bells are said to be the inspiration for the face of the Disney character Baymax.

The Shinjuku Shrine That Inspired the Face of Baymax in 'Big Hero 6'

April 29, 2017

In 2014, the Disney animated feature Big Hero 6 made its world premiere at the 27th Tokyo International Film Festival. It was an obvious choice for this film to debut in Japan’s capital, given that Japanese culture played such a heavy influence on the film’s production design.

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Tags golden gai, shinjuku, tokyo international film festival, film-lover's guide to japan

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe speaks onstage between acting legend Meryl Streep and other VIPs at the Tokyo International Film Festival on October 25, 2016.

The Tokyo International Film Festival: 2015–2016 Photo Tour

November 3, 2016

Every year in late October, the Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF-JP) kicks off in the Roppongi Hills complex, located in the affluent ward of Minato. 2015 and 2016 were no different; the 45 images in this post relate to those years, when globally renowned actors and directors like Koji Yakusho, Helen Mirren, Robert Zemeckis, and Meryl Streep made appearances. The focus here is the festival’s opening day, where you’ll see what it’s like to attend a screening, and then engage in a bit of people-watching from the public viewing area during the red carpet ceremony.

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Tags tokyo international film festival, film-lover's guide to japan