jstages.com is a bilingual (Japanese and English) website providing up-to-date news, articles, previews and reviews about theatre and dance in Japan and the UK, as well as interviews with leading artists and a range of archive material.
Who is jstages.com?
jstages.com is curated by the two specialists whose CVs are supplied below — one being a Japanese writer on theatre and dance who returned to Tokyo in 2000 after 10 years in London; the other an arts-loving English writer with 12 years of experience as a staff editor with The Guardian in London and even longer spent working full-time for English-language newspapers in Japan.
If you are a theatre lover in Japan who has trouble getting as much information in English as you’d like. Jstages.com aims to keep you abreast of whatever’s happening in genres as diverse as Takarazuka and ballet, butoh, Shakespeare, classical and cutting-edge contemporary drama in this country.
Meanwhile, if you are an art creator or producer, our translation service may allow you to do business with English speakers worldwide.
Nobuko Tanaka
Graduated from Chuo University with a BA in German literature, having written her dissertation on the playwright Bertolt Brecht’s theory of drama and also having seen a lot of plays in the then-vibrant shogekijo (small-scale theatre) scene.
Afterwards, she worked at a German pharmaceutical company for six years,during which time she visited the Edinburgh International Festival, the world’s biggest arts event that’s held every summer in Scotland’s capital.
With that experience she fell so much in love with British culture that she moved to London, becoming a UK resident and working there for almost 10 years. During that time, she also got MA in arts management at City University in London.
After returning to Tokyo in 2000, she immediately began contributing theatre articles to Japan’s leading English-language newspaper, The Japan Times, for which she has now been a regular writer on contemporary drama and dance for more than 15 years.
She also writes articles for a number of Japanese-language theatre magazines — including Theater Guide, Higeki Kigeki and Theatre Arts — as well as the programs for a range of stage productions in Japan and England.
Andrew Kershaw
Born and brought up in Lancashire in the northwest of England, he got a BA in economics and math from Warwick University before studying for an MA in social anthropology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
Afterward, back in England started working for a publisher in London, for whom he planned and launched The Radio 1 Story of Pop, a weekly reference magazine for which he was the commissioning editor, and which ran to 124 issues and several editions.
He then became a freelance author, and was commissioned to write several published non-fiction titles before embarking on a newspaper career.
After starting as a reporter, then sub-editor, on local and metropolitan titles, he became a staff editor with The Guardian in London, where he stayed for 12 years before moving to Japan. In Tokyo, he was an editor at the Asahi Evening News and then, for more than 13 years, at The Japan Times before becoming free-lance in 2014.