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Farmers in the city of Tamura, Fukushima Prefecture, have begun planting rice in a district once designated a no-go zone because of radioactive fallout ejected by the disaster-hit Fukushima No. 1 power plant.
Recently I was asked to write a blurb for a new liquid plant-nutrient. As soon as I saw the name of the product, 早根早起 （Hayane Hayaoki), I smiled at this example of linguistic creativity.
Life in Japan just seems tailor-made for certain foreign residents, who slip into the fabric of this society as smoothly as a hand slides into a glove. American Curtis Patterson, a professional koto player and music teacher, is a case in point. Not only ...
Denmark’s Emmelie de Forest won this year’s Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday night with her ethno-inspired flute and drum tune “Only Teardrops,” despite tough competition from spectacular stage shows by performers from Azerbaijan and Ukraine. Juries and television viewers across Europe awarded the barefoot, ...
One team’s quest for a first title has ended. The other team’s fight will continue next season. The Yokohama B-Corsairs outplayed the Rizing Fukuoka in Sunday’s bj-league championship game, controlling the tempo for larger stretches and making enough timely baskets to fill an instructional ...
Would it be premature to hail this as the best early-Showa period album of 2010? Osaka duo Tomari’s debut album pays little heed to the stylistic advances of the past half-century, turning instead to the music of prewar Japan for inspiration. It’s a sound ...
Sheffield has come on a long way over the past 20 years. England’s one-time “City of Steel” was, in the dying days of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s era, a pretty grim place to be, its factories shuttered and its high streets desolate. Today, it ...
If you want to get a sense of the sprawling possibilities at Fuji Rock, just look at Rafven’s schedule. The former street band from Gothenburg, Sweden, managed to play no less than nine times during the festival, bringing their exuberant brand of gypsy-style revelry ...
It’s a promoter’s nightmare: an event which must be held in one of the most remote parts of the country, where the centerpiece occurs on a weekday morning, with no chance of rescheduling. Then again, when you’re talking about the longest total solar eclipse ...
It’s a promoter’s nightmare: an event which must be held in one of the most remote parts of the country, where the centerpiece occurs on a weekday morning, with no chance of rescheduling. Then again, when you’re talking about the longest total solar eclipse ...
Following Sheena Ringo can be a frustrating business. Her third album, 2003′s “Karuki Zamen Kuri no Hana” (“Lime, Semen, Chestnut Blossoms”), ranks as one of the most wildly ambitious pop records of the past decade, which made it all the more confounding when she ...
“You’re pretty stinky, aren’t you? Well, I’m gonna love you anyway,” sings TsuShiMaMiRe’s guitarist/vocalist Mari on “Mike Smell Kunkun.” It takes a brief moment to realize that she’s talking to her microphone, not some hygienically challenged boyfriend. “A, Umi da” (“Oh, It’s the Sea”) ...
You might expect a band named after the Sanskrit term for “absolute reality” to be a bit, well, pretentious. But if their moniker is evocative of patchouli, long beards and even longer guitar solos, Brahman’s music remains firmly grounded. The Tokyo-based quartet specialize in ...
When Ego-Wrappin’ performed on Asahi TV’s “Music Station” show in July last year, singer Yoshie Nakano started their set by planting a kiss right on the camera lens, leaving a smudge of lipstick behind. It was the kind of insouciant gesture that the band ...
When Ego-Wrappin’ performed on Asahi TV’s “Music Station” show in July last year, singer Yoshie Nakano started their set by planting a kiss right on the camera lens, leaving a smudge of lipstick behind. It was the kind of insouciant gesture that the band ...
While attending boarding school in Boston in the mid 1990s, Seiji Kameyama used to play hip-hop CDs that he’d brought back from Japan to his friends. “Back then, people used to laugh about it,” he recalls. “They’d be like, ‘What the heck is this, ...
The release of Mass of the Fermenting Dregs’ self-titled debut this time last year marked them out as a band to watch. The Kobe-based three-piece (known to fans as Masudore) betrayed a rare knack for melding pop sensibilities with the aural assault of the ...