The death toll from a blizzard that hit Hokkaido and the Tohoku region over the weekend has risen to nine, local police said Monday. The latest fatality as of Monday was Kuniko Jingi, 76, who was found collapsed under the snow on a road ...
Sleeping in. Breakfast in bed. Sunny brunches. Strolls in the park. Laid-back afternoon tea. Cocktails at sunset. Decadent late nights. Saturday — the word brings to mind a flurry of images associated with the first day of the weekend and the chances are, they ...
For the past year, Tokyo sixth-grader Manami has had dinner at home an average of four times a week. The rest of the time she has had to make do with a juku-ben, a boxed dinner prepared by her mother and consumed between classes ...
SELLING WOMEN: Prostitution, Markets and the Household in Early Modern Japan, by Amy Stanley. University of California Press, 2012, 282 pp., $49.95 (hardcover) In the vast cultural landscape, Japan fascinates the mainstream with manga and anime, the martial arts, Zen and kimono. Of course, ...
Cuba overpowers China, winning 12-0 and advancing to the second round of the World Baseball Classic.
What separates most modern Japanese progressive rock bands from their British 1970s counterparts is that they hone their sound through live performances rather than through months of expensive recording-studio time. As a result, when they do eventually make an album, the recording represents more ...
“You should be able to go into any sort of club and not be sure exactly what to expect,” says Keith Gordon of Okinawan-styled electronic duo Ryukyu Underground, as he sits drinking tea in his record label’s office in Aoyama, central Tokyo. “You should ...
“That’s always been their therapy: to bring it together, at least for themselves, in their own environment and their own space. You know, like flowers and rainbows, beautiful people everywhere, and everything’s nice.” Such are the thoughts of Guillermo Scott Herren, the prolific and ...
Comprising guitarist/vocalist Ehi, bassist Nao and drummer Yatch (the group’s sole male member), squeaky-voiced punkers Who the Bitch formed in Tokyo in 2006. Since then they have made a name for themselves with their slick, harmony-infected take on the kind of quirky, chirpy garage ...
Rock music in Japan tends to treat a band’s move to a major label as a kind of year-zero moment, by which all their previous material is airbrushed from existence like disgraced Politburo members from old Soviet photographs. It’s tempting to see this best-of ...
Rock music in Japan tends to treat a band’s move to a major label as a kind of year-zero moment, by which all their previous material is airbrushed from existence like disgraced Politburo members from old Soviet photographs. It’s tempting to see this best-of ...
“I like bands that are energetic and stupid. And with no sense of fashion. We hate fashionable bands whose music is no good.” Kaita Tanaka — singer, guitarist and main talker in Tokyo-based underground rock band Worst Taste — is trying to explain how ...
Often dismissed in their early days as a poor man’s Pizzicato 5, Capsule nevertheless quickly formed a reputation for themselves as torchbearers into the new millennium of the 1990s Shibuya-kei boom. However, as Pizzicato 5′s Yasuharu Konishi’s flirtations with manufactured pop as a producer ...
‘A lot of the companies we signed to disappeared, basically,” says Ali Morizumi of pan-national rock duo Monoral, musing on the mysterious curse that has followed his band around. “We’d make a minialbum and then the company would go bankrupt, then we’d make another ...
‘I was looking to do something different, but at the same time if it was too unique, it could fail,” says Masayuki Miyaji, director of PlayStation Network’s new anime series “Xam’d: Lost Memories.” “But then if it fails, that might even be more fun.” ...
