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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.
It’s dangerous to talk to an artist. Whatever you think of their art, after a conversation with them, you are bound to walk away intrigued, enchanted — maybe even disgusted (which isn’t necessarily bad) — but mostly, hopefully, enlightened by a new understanding of ...
Maison Hermes 8th Floor, “Le Forum” Closes May 11 What a mess. What a brilliant mess. Thirty-eight year-old American artist Sarah Sze has turned Maison Hermes 8th Floor “Le Forum” exhibition space in Tokyo’s Ginza into a giant rec room. While the artists at ...
In the minds of casual observers, Japan is simple. Between lovers of tradition and those enraptured by Japan’s quirky window into an urban future, it’s either the former land of austere, honorable warriors or the current one of air-headed, emotionally overwrought manga characters. But ...
Yukari Art Contemporary Much like his work, Kazuharu Ishikawa is hard to forget. A human exclamation point, the Tama Art University graduate sports a shaved head with a single spike of hair extending 30 cm straight up in celebration of the line. A single ...
Magical Art Room Don’t want to go to a gallery? Why not walk past one instead. Magical Art Room in Roppongi (www.magical-artroom.com) is currently showing an installation by artist Hitoshi Kuriyama that can only be observed from outside the gallery’s storefront window. Working with ...
Taka Ishii Gallery You may remember Bill the Cat from Berkeley Breathed’s cartoon strips of the 1980s and ’90s, “Bloom County” and “Outland.” If not, Google him — a Hunter S. Thompson-esque character, Bill’s face was an asymmetrical explosion of whiskers that always appeared ...
This was another great year for art enthusiasts with breadth, depth and an audience for all kinds exhibitions and events. Blockbusters, whether of traditional Japanese works, Western classics or Modernism, will always be blockbusters here. To name just a small sample of the excellent ...
Like Picasso at his most mythologically cubist or a dark dream from the subconscious, the Dairakudakan butoh dance troupe took its audience back to the primordial for its 35th anniversary performances last week — and then brought it right back to the present. A ...
Mado Lounge, Mori Hills 52F Tis the season after all, and art loves a party. But with whom? Event organizers Art Lounge think with anyone creative. Founded this year, the group looks to bring together Tokyo’s often isolated creative communities — the fashion, design, ...
Gallery Side 2 Pale can be so depressing, and weathered can just seem aged. But in Norbert Schwontkowski’s textured and demurely colored paintings at Higashi-Azabu’s Gallery Side 2 (www.galleryside2.net), his simplistic yet telling portraits and cityscapes feel light and full of whimsy. The 58-year-old ...
China casts a long shadow over the Japanese art market. However lively, large and long-suffering the art world in Japan may be, it has not garnered the kind of excited interest that the relatively young Chinese scene has in the last five years. Just ...
D.H. Rosen, an occasional contributor to The Japan Times Arts Page, is also a ceramicist who has been studying art at Tama Art University in Tokyo since 2004. Unlike many foreign ceramic artists who come to absorb the traditional wabi-sabi aesthetic of traditional pottery, ...