Transport authorities launched a full-fledged investigation Sunday into the derailment of a bullet train on the Akita Shinkansen Line in Daisen, Akita Prefecture, on Saturday afternoon.
It's a dangerous, unpredictable world. Twice in January Chinese warships in the East China Sea challenged Japan's Maritime Self Defense Forces patrols in a manner deemed threatening. And on Feb. 12 came North Korea's nuclear test.
Here's an open secret: Japanese men have a bad international reputation on the romance front.
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, ...
Kenta Maeda shook off worries about his form with five shutout innings as Japan beat China 5-2 in first-round Pool A of the World Baseball Classic on Sunday at Fukuoka Dome. Japan improved to 2-0 following a tough win over Brazil in Saturday evening’s ...
Seiho Hayakawa started making music the way a lot of curious kids growing up in the digital age did — by fiddling with his cell-phone ringer. But he eventually plunged headfirst into the world of jazz as a high school student, with a trumpet ...
Osaka’s The Creams put on one of the better live sets in the Kansai region today, playing the sort of dance-rock that seems like it was plotted out on graph paper in the vein of 1980′s cool kids such as Liquid Liquid or ESG. ...
Miila and the Geek’s debut album, “New Age,” would be my favorite Japanese album of 2011 even without the postquake context into which it was released. The Tokyo trio took the abrasive sound of no-wave and crafted catchy songs out of it. On tracks ...
In an interview with The Japan Times in May, Friends frontman Syouta Kaneko put forth U.S. band The Beach Boys as one of their influences. A glance at the artwork for “Let’s Get Together Again” — found photos of people enjoying the summer — ...
The music Sapphire Slows conjures up on her debut EP, “True Breath,” floats between genres: dance music, dream pop and ambient are just a few. However, the element uniting these five songs is really how unsettling they can sound — even at their most ...
Osaka’s Innit crew don’t hold your typical club event. Though their parties feature a mix of live performers and DJs, founder Masayuki Kubo wants to attract a particular type of reveler — aspiring artists. The Osaka native offers a ¥500 discount for anyone who ...
The world Canopies And Drapes crafts on her debut EP “Violet, Lilly, Rose, Daisy” feels like a particularly woozy dream, albeit one undercut by the ever-lurking obstacles of reality. The project of Tokyo artist “Chick,” her music hasn’t always sounded like this — she ...
“Don’t Know Where” lacks prerelease hype, sub-subgenre classification or needless gimmicks (unless consistant lyrical allusions to driving cars qualifies — autocore, anyone?). Honeydew’s debut album is a simple collection of feedback-assisted indie pop reminiscent of U.S. group Yo La Tengo’s catchier rock songs — ...
“DocumentaLy,” rock outfit Sakanaction’s fifth full-length, stands as the group’s best effort to date and one of the biggest mainstream triumphs in Japanese music this year. The Tokyo-based band didn’t accomplish this through a sudden change in sound or any other grandiose moves often ...
Dance-music maker Paul Dolby, aka Seiji, has played with many electronic genres since he began DJing in the 1990s. The Seiji coming to Japan this weekend releases club-centric tracks for free on his website while also putting his personal spin on artists such as ...
