December 16 is the 350th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 15 days remain until the end of the year.
Manzanar is the site of one of ten American concentration camps, where more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II from March 1942 to November 1945. Although it had over 10,000 inmates at its peak, it was one of the smaller internment camps. It is located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California's Owens Valley, between the towns of Lone Pine to the south and Independence to the north, approximately 230 miles (370 km) north of Los Angeles. Manzanar means "apple orchard" in Spanish. The Manzanar National Historic Site, which preserves and interprets the legacy of Japanese American incarceration in the United States, was identified by the United States National Park Service as the best-preserved of the ten former camp sites.
Yukio Mishima, born Kimitake Hiraoka, was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, ultra-nationalist, and leader of an attempted coup d'état which culminated in his suicide. Mishima is considered one of the most important postwar stylists of the Japanese language. He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times in the 1960s—including in 1968, but that year the award went to his countryman and benefactor Yasunari Kawabata. His works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and the autobiographical essay Sun and Steel. Mishima's work is characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death", according to author Andrew Rankin.
The year 1945 in film involved some significant events. With 1945 being the last year of World War II, the many films released this year had themes of patriotism, sacrifices, and peace. In the United States, there were more than eighteen thousand movie theatres operating in 1945, a figure that grew by a third from a decade earlier.
Comfort women were women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces in occupied countries and territories before and during World War II. The term comfort women is a translation of the Japanese ianfu, a euphemism that literally means "comforting, consoling woman". During World War II, Japanese troops forced hundreds of thousands of women from Australia, Burma, China, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, East Timor, New Guinea and other countries into sexual enslavement for Japanese troops; however, the majority of the women were from Korea. Many women died or died by suicide due to brutal mistreatment and sustained physical and emotional distress. After the war, Japan's acknowledgment of the comfort women's plight was minimal, lacking a full apology and appropriate restitution, which damaged Japan's reputation in Asia for decades. Only in the 1990s did the Japanese government begin to officially apologize and offer compensation. However, apologies from Japanese officials have been criticized as insincere.
Noriyuki "Pat" Morita was an American actor and comedian. He began his career as a stand-up comedian, before becoming known to television audiences for his recurring role as diner owner Matsuo "Arnold" Takahashi on the sitcom series Happy Days (1975-83). He was subsequently nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of martial arts mentor Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid (1984), which would be the first of a media franchise in which Morita was the central player.
Arthur Edward Pepper Jr. was an American jazz musician, most known as an alto saxophonist. He occasionally performed and recorded on tenor saxophone, clarinet and bass clarinet. Active primarily in West Coast jazz, Pepper first came to prominence in Stan Kenton's big band. He was known for his emotionally charged performances and several stylistic shifts throughout his career, and was described by critic Scott Yanow as having "attained his goal of becoming the world's greatest altoist" at the time of his death in 1982.
Thomas Mark Harmon is an American actor and former football player. He is perhaps best known for playing the lead role of Leroy Jethro Gibbs on NCIS. He has appeared in a wide variety of television roles since the early 1970s, including Dr. Robert Caldwell on St. Elsewhere, Detective Dicky Cobb on Reasonable Doubts, and Dr. Jack McNeil on Chicago Hope. He also starred in such films as Summer School, Prince of Bel Air, Stealing Home, Wyatt Earp, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Freaky Friday, and Chasing Liberty.
During its imperial era, the Empire of Japan committed numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity across various Asian-Pacific nations, notably during the Second Sino-Japanese and Pacific Wars. These incidents have been referred to as "the Asian Holocaust", and "Japan's Holocaust", and also as the "Rape of Asia". The crimes occurred during the early part of the Shōwa era, under Hirohito's reign.
Pink film refers in Japan to movies produced by independent studios that includes nudity or deals with sexual content. This encompasses everything from dramas to action thrillers and exploitation film features. Many pink films would be analogous to erotic thrillers such as Fatal Attraction, Fifty Shades of Grey, Basic Instinct and 9½ Weeks.
Sha Na Na was an American rock and roll and doo-wop revival group formed in 1969. The group performed a song-and-dance repertoire based on 1950s hit songs that both revived and parodied the music and the New York City street culture of the 1950s. After gaining initial fame for their performance at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, made possible with help from their friend Jimi Hendrix, the group hosted Sha Na Na, a syndicated variety series that ran from 1977 to 1981.
Trevor John Morgan is an American actor. He has appeared in the films Genius, The Sixth Sense, The Patriot, A Rumor of Angels, Jurassic Park III, The Glass House, Chasing 3000, Mean Creek, Barney's Great Adventure, Local Color, Family Plan, and Uncle Nino.
Sam Irvin is an American film and television director, producer, screenwriter, actor, author and film teacher.
Kenji Hamada is a Japanese voice actor from Fukuoka, Japan who is an affiliate of Mausu Promotion. On adult works, he goes under the alias of Ken Akiresu.
M*A*S*H is a 1970 American black comedy war film directed by Robert Altman and written by Ring Lardner Jr., based on Richard Hooker's 1968 novel MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors. The film is the only theatrically released feature film in the M*A*S*H franchise.
There is a population of Japanese Americans and Japanese expatriates in Greater Seattle, whose origins date back to the second half of the 19th century. Prior to World War II, Seattle's Japanese community had grown to become the second largest Nihonmachi on the West Coast of North America.
Hi Izuru Tokoro, also known as Sunny, is the fifth studio album by Japanese musician Ringo Sheena released on November 5, 2014 by Universal Music Japan sublabel Virgin Records. It is a compilation studio album compiling singles released since 2009 as well as new compositions.
Tomiyama Taeko was a Japanese visual artist and writer whose work addressed the moral, emotional, and social issues related to nationalist, patriarchal, colonial, and post-colonial power structures in East Asia. Tomiyama used popular media such as oil painting, lithographic prints, collages, multimedia slideshows, books, and installations to explore marginalized figures. From the 1980s on, much of her work drew on indigenous Asian mythology, symbols, and aesthetics as a critique and rejection of the violent, exploitative, Euro-American-centric values embedded in modernist thinking. She was a devoted feminist, leftist, and anti-nationalist whose work told the stories of miners, ethnic minorities, comfort women, Minjung activists, and other marginalized groups to advocate for a reckoning with the nuances of colonial and imperial histories of Japan in Asia. Tomiyama died in August 2021, at the age of 99.
