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P/SUNNY
Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s private disco featured not only aspiring showgirls performing striptease acts as sexy nuns and nurses, but one woman dressed up as President Barack Obama and a prominent Milan prosecutor whom the billionaire media mogul has accused of persecuting him, ...
Tonkatsu is comfort food, gourmand grub — not a gourmet delicacy. So what are those hearty, unpretentious deep-fried breaded pork cutlets doing in an elegant little bar-style restaurant above one of Ginza’s temples to high-end consumption? Katsuzen has come a long way from its ...
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 ...
It is a tricky deal being an authorized biographer. Charles Moore’s big advantage over those who have previously tackled Margaret Thatcher is that he has been provided with material denied to them. Of the arrangement that he was offered by his subject, he writes: ...
Unbelievable energy. Splendid self confidence. Never-wavering faith in his abilities or his teammates. Those are ingredients to success for Draelon Burns, the Yokohama B-Corsairs’ super substitute. Burns buried a remarkable three buzzer-beating shots to close out the three final quarters, and his team needed ...
“Photogenic” is the sound of a wrongfully imprisoned inmate who was cleared of all charges being sent back to prison for no good reason. J-pop siren Salyu (born Ayako Mori) has spent the majority of her decade-plus career singing over generic instrumentals, her voice ...
Galileo Galilei’s sophomore album, “Portal,” manages to both document everything that’s wrong with contemporary mainstream Japanese rock music and offer a better way for guitar-centric pop in this county. This Hokkaido group falls through many of the same trapdoors as artists dotting the Oricon ...
Tokyo Jihen’s first five albums have titles relating to types of television programming, “Sports” or “Variety” or “Adult.” The Shiina-Ringo-led group’s sixth album, though, is titled “Color Bars,” after the rainbow lines that grace the TV screen during technical difficulties or dead-air time. It’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 ...