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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 ...
Imagine a lasagna without the meat. Now drop the cheese and pasta too. Not much left? Veggie Paradise, which opened in September in Tokyo’s Yoyogi Uehara neighborhood, fills in the blanks with zucchini slices in place of the pasta, fermented cashew nuts that replicate ...
It’s easy to be cynical about Point et Ligne, a boutique bakery that sells staple food at gastronomic prices. Loaves for ¥2,500 under the moody lighting of a jazz club? Clutch your purse and approach with skepticism. But there’s good reason the Marunouchi, Tokyo ...
If you’re in the Hyakunincho area, Tokyo’s unofficial Koreatown, blocks north of Shinjuku Ward’s Kabukicho, be sure to take a trawl of these eclectic bars: Shinjuku Pocha Yellowing newspapers, empty booze bottles and corrugated steel panels might sound like a rather desperate choice of ...
To misquote Judy Garland: this doesn’t feel much like Tokyo anymore. There are shops selling bootleg Korean videotapes. Yes, tapes. There are Halal grocery stores that stay open until 1 a.m.; cut-price clothing stores that close even later. There are signs in Thai, Arabic ...
Renzo Rosso is a floppy-haired fiftysomething who would blend in perfectly on a porn set, but instead runs Diesel S.p.A., the casual clothing megabrand. Standing in his fancy new Aoyama gallery he’s admiring “Black Wind crosses meadow,” an artwork by Hiroki Tsukuda consisting of ...
Naughty Atami is the Shizuoka resort with the beachfront soaplands and other salacious establishments. It’s got the fraying Hihokan (literally: House of Secret Treasures), likely the world’s least scholarly sex museum, with its holographic strippers and a Marilyn Monroe mannequin that exposes itself on ...
The fourth album from Afrobeat standard-bearers Antibalas comes roaring in with a fanfare of battle horns over razor-sharp breakbeats on the aptly named opening track “Beaten Metal.” LPs don’t open much more ferociously than this. Next comes “Filibuster X,” the track that will best ...
File it under funk, but the sophomore release from Lefties Soul Connection is not your average revival. It’s the sound of European B-Boys with the confidence to mix the punkish attitude of the early hip-hop with the exuberant New Orleans funk of The Meters. ...
Here’s a quick introduction to the Hato Bus Company: They’re Tokyo’s oldest tour bus operator. They cart holidaymakers around the country — sometimes to far-flung places, sometimes to Roppongi Hills. They’re a wonderful way to palm off guests from overseas, at least for a ...