Schilling, Mark: - Born in Zanesville, Ohio in 1949, Mark Schilling arrived in Tokyo in 1975 and has lived there ever since. He has been reviewing Japanese films for The Japan Times since 1989 and has reported on the Japanese film industry from 1990 to the present, first for Screen International and currently for Variety. His articles on Japanese films and culture have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The Asian Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Interview, The Japan Quarterly, Kinema Junpo and the Japan editions of Newsweek, Time, Vogue and Premiere. Among his book publications are The Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture (Weatherhill, 1997), Contemporary Japanese Film (Weatherhill, 1999), The Yakuza Movie Book -- A Guide to Japanese Gangster Films (Stone Bridge Press, 2003)and No Borders, No Limits: Nikkatsu Action Cinema (FAB Press, 2007).
He has contributed to several other books, including Japan Pop! (M.E. Sharpe, 2000), Ichikawa Kon (Cinematheque Ontario, 2001) and Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture (Routledge, 2002), as well as translating and writing the introduction for Princess Mononoke -- The Art and Making of Japan's Most Popular Film of All Time (Hyperion, 1999). Schilling has been a program adviser to the Udine Far East Film Festival, Europe's leading showcase of Asian popular cinema, since 19999. In 2005 he programmed a 16-film retrospective devoted to the Nikkatsu Action genre for Udine and in 2010 a 15-film section on the genre films of the Shintoho studio.