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NTT DoCoMo Inc., despite being Japan’s biggest mobile phone carrier, has been struggling against tough smartphone competition from KDDI Corp. and Softbank Corp., which is leading in that area. But one edge that the cellphone behemoth — it has more than 60 million subscribers ...
Throughout most of Japan, June is the rainy season. While all that rainfall is great for rice paddies so that we can have delicious new harvest rice in the fall, it makes it a rather dull month for seasonal produce: The summer’s bounty of ...
If you don’t get into the ring once or twice, then you’re a coward, Geoffrey Ima says as he describes people’s attitudes toward boxing in his hometown in Uganda. Ima has been in the ring hundreds of times and came to love boxing so ...
Claude Regy says the team at the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) threw him the “best birthday party ever” when he arrived in Japan just days after the actual May 1 occasion. The 90-year-old French director is hoping for an even better birthday gift, ...
The 27-year-old defender says he was ready for a change of scenery after helping Sanfrecce Hiroshima win theJ. League title last season.
Keigo Oyamada stopped writing hits a long time ago. Not playing the pop star suits him just fine. It gives Oyamada — formerly of Flipper’s Guitar but better known since 1993 as avant-pop boffin Cornelius — more time to indulge his multimedia fantasies to ...
‘Every time I do interviews, they ask me about the same things — poverty, war and the power of the church,” says 45-year-old Ian Brown by telephone from Manchester. Tired of being quoted out of context, for his latest solo album, “The World is ...
Few bands are better placed than R&B revivalists Bawdies to ride the current Showa Boom. Listening to this second album from the mod-attired Toyko four-piece — leader Ryo “Roy” Watanabe (bass/vocals), Taku “Taxman” Funayama (guitar/vocals), Yoshihiko “Jim” Kimura (guitar/vocals) and Masahiko “Marcy” Yamaguchi (drums/vocals) ...
It was reportedly good enough for Elizabeth Taylor. It kept Chairman Mao forever young (until he died). And Charlie Chaplin went straight to the source — a clinic in Bucharest — for it. Now, thanks to a tieup between Romania’s government and the high-class ...
“Sorry, I’m having pure chaos!” It’s 7:45 p.m. on a cool, late summer’s evening in Portland, Oregon. Beth Ditto will soon be entertaining a full house, and her cat has just bolted out the front door. Still, Ditto, the Arkansas-born, openly gay frontwoman of ...
Thirty-five years — that’s how long it took for singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan to be convinced there was an audience ready for a followup to her long-lost 1970 classic, the Joe Boyd-produced “Just Another Diamond Day.” Among this swelling fan base was the likes of ...
“I think there are more jokes on it than people might realize,” says one of the most distinctive voices in British pop, Robert Wyatt, when asked why his latest album isn’t exactly a laugh-a-minute listen despite being titled “Comicopera.” “I used to joke that ...
‘Mine’s best’ ‘It’s been lovely,” said former Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker toward the end of his Friday afternoon set at FRF ’07. And indeed it was. The JT caught up with Cocker backstage after his show and asked him to elaborate. How was the ...
“Eco-cute!” was 24-year-old J-pop superidol Kumi Koda’s response, according to organizers, when asked to perform at the Tokyo leg of Live Earth, a series of concerts taking place at nine cities around the world on July 7 to encourage music fans to take action ...
No festival this summer will attract more punters through its turnstiles than Rock In Japan. And no band is likely to get the crowds more animated over this all-Japanese music fest’s three days than female duo Puffy. Now in their 30s, Ami Onuki and ...
If there’s a saving grace to living in a megalopolis of 12 million people, it’s that there’s a scene catering to the whim of every kind of music fan. And scenes don’t come with much more grace — and style — than the one ...
He captured rock ‘n’ roll iconoclasts David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed at the height of their fame in the 1970s. Now photographer Mick Rock turns his lens toward a different kind of glam icon, kabuki actor Nakamura Kanzaburo XVIII, for an exhibition ...