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Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency leaker, defended his disclosure of top-secret U.S. spying programs in an online chat Monday with The Guardian newspaper and attacked U.S. officials for calling him a traitor. “The U.S. government is not going to be able to cover ...
Keeping track of your assets Money Forward is a personal financial asset management service (in Japanese) that works similar to the U.S.-based service Mint.com. With more than 160 partners including banks, credit-card companies and mobile carriers, the service automatically pulls all your financial information ...
Edward Snowden, the fugitive former CIA employee and NSA contractor who leaked secrets about America’s spying operations, often hung out online with foreigners in Japan who shared his interests in anime, video games, martial arts, the stock market and the expat lifestyle. Snowden, who ...
The Toronto Comics Arts Festival, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, has of late made its name bringing over cutting-edge Japanese artists for signings, live drawing sessions and speaking events. The atmosphere at this year’s event, held in May, in many ways like ...
Manu Ginobili ran onto the floor as fans stood and screamed. He went to the bench, and they chanted his name. The sights and sounds of so many San Antonio spring nights were back Sunday — and the real party might be just a ...
For Benjamin Woodward's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
The Saito Kinen Festival continues to showcase opera from off the beaten track with a production of Leos Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen,” conducted by festival founder Seiji Ozawa. First performed in 1924 and fashioned out of a newspaper comic strip, this breezy, bucolic ...
Mention “Die Soldaten,” B.A. Zimmermann’s dark, uncompromising and harrowing work of 1960s modernism, and Hiroshi Wakasugi visibly brightens. It’s the first season for this highly respected conductor as artistic director of Tokyo’s New National Theater, and he’s clearly very, very pleased that he has ...
With the publication last week of the new Michelin Guide, the world may now know Tokyo to be the culinary capital that it is. Opera, on the other hand, lags slightly behind, although compared to many other cities there is still an embarrassment of ...
Storytelling lies at the heart of Japanese pianist Yu Kosuge’s art. “I loved to write, and when I was a child, I would write a story for each piece I played,” says the soft-spoken 24-year-old in English. “Back then I would imagine dances with ...
The New National Theatre, under the aegis of recently appointed director Hiroshi Wakasugi, opens its 2007/8 season with Richard Wagner’s 1845 grand Romantic opera “Tannhauser.” Though an early work in the Wagner canon, “Tannhauser” baffled and awed audiences when it was first performed and ...
Under the baton of Seiji Ozawa, some of Japan’s top classical musicians gather each year for roughly a month of opera and orchestral concerts. The Saito Kinen Festival showcases an opera, usually something a little offbeat, and this year it’s Tchaikovsky’s “Pikovaya Dama” (“The ...
With tickets for Italian maestro Riccardo Muti’s concerts sold out, Russian conductor Andrey Boreyko’s concert with Russian pianist and former International Tchaikovsky Competition gold medalist Boris Berezovsky is a good and by-no-means lesser alternative. In fact, it probably has the more interesting program. Most ...
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The genius, the divinely inspired child, the idiot savant, the skilled populist craftsman, the underappreciated artist in his time who died tragically young in anonymous penury. Every generation makes of him what they will; the legends abound. And 250 years after ...
Giacomo Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” is one of most beloved operas of all time. Musically rich, dramatically taut and shamelessly wringing every last drop of sentiment from its tale of innocence betrayed, it shows Puccini at the top of his form. Yet its seductive beauty ...
The Alban Berg Quartett occupies a near-legendary position among string quartets. Their technical fluency, the beauty of their playing, the harmony of their interpretation — have left critics searching for superlatives and ensured their constant demand in recital halls around the world. Taking their ...
“Russians always need a little shit in our lives. If everything is good and we seem completely happy, then we become suspicious of that.” This is Russian opera star Anna Netrebko’s philosophy — slightly incongruous for one who, at a glance, seems to have ...
Kent Nagano is nothing if not a very busy man. The musical director of the Los Angeles Opera, the artistic director and chief conductor of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, Berlin, and the guest director of many world-famous orchestras, the California native is in demand as ...