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Pope Francis’ fascination with the devil took on remarkable new twists Tuesday, with a well-known exorcist insisting Francis helped “liberate” a Mexican man possessed by four different demons despite the Vatican’s insistence that no such papal exorcism took place. The case concerns a 43-year-old ...
Kazuhiro Shiraishi, 66, is a guest-house manager in the Izu-kogen Highlands, a famous resort area on the Izu Peninsula of Shizuoka Prefecture. Looking out onto the Pacific Ocean, and just 90 minutes by train from Tokyo, Izu has a warm climate all year round ...
“I was stopped by two men in a government-registered vehicle, blindfolded and dragged off the street. They took me away to a house in a place I did not know. I was forced into a room with blood all over the walls and floor, ...
Guitarist Dustin Wong hesitates for a split second. It’s a pause that would go unnoticed during most other sets, but Wong has spent the last 40 minutes seemingly in a trance while playing guitar and looping the notes via an array of pedals in ...
Tim Duncan saves the day as the Spurs hold off the Grizzlies in overtime
Ichitaro Nakanoshima likes nothing better than to spend the late morning watching videos of old musicals like “Singin’ in the Rain.” Nakanoshima, though, is no slacker. Before settling down to watch Gene Kelly trip the light fantastic, he starts his day at 6 a.m. ...
Nostalgia is a dangerous thing. In the wrong hands, it can be an outlet for excessive sentimentality and out-and-out kitsch. In the right hands, however, it can be a healthy look at the past, an appreciation of what has gone before that doesn’t dogmatically ...
No word on whether Chinese President Jiang Zemin will embark on a new career as a rock star after the members of Japanese pop-rock band Glay presented him with an electric guitar at his official residence in Beijing on Sept. 10. Glay were in ...
Japanese pop music is crap. So say many of my friends, especially the non-Japanese ones. They reach that conclusion after noticing that the charts are full of chipmunk-voiced idols who are long on looks and short on talent — and whose shelf lives are ...
Yellow Magic Orchestra burst upon the scene in the late ’70s with a refreshing and original blend of pop music and electronic sounds that established a new pop template and influenced musicians all over the world. The band broke up in 1983 and, apart ...
Can Kiyoshi Hikawa save enka? Enka — usually, but imperfectly, translated as “Japanese ballads” — has fallen to an all-time low in terms of popularity, accounting for less than 10 percent of music sales in Japan. One of the problems with enka is its ...
It’s taken a while, but punk rock seems to have finally broken into the J-pop mainstream. Punk bands that have recently made it into the Oricon album chart include Nicotine, the Stance Punks, Sobut (whose name, by the way, stands for “Sons of Bitches ...
If you’ve walked by the Laforet building in Harajuku recently, you might have noticed a huge banner that draped the structure’s exterior featuring a masked character, looking something like a pro wrestler, poking his head out of what appears to be a body of ...
The silly season — when the midsummer heat engenders a sort of benign lunacy — is well and truly upon us. And you can’t get much sillier, in the nicest sense of the word, than The Yellow Dogs and The Bunnies, two resolutely retro ...
“Senko (Flash),” singer/songwriter UA’s first single in three years, further cements her status as one of J-pop’s most enigmatic and original artists. Released July 24, “Senko” is a dark, moody piece that’s half tone poem and half pop song. UA and co-producer Rei Harakami ...
Rock stars can do things us regular folks can’t. They can get good tables at crowded restaurants without a reservation. They can have promiscuous sex and take all sorts of exotic drugs and then be knighted by the Queen. And if they’re Eikichi Yazawa, ...
One interesting aspect of Japanese meishi (name-card) etiquette is that entertainers never give them out. It took me a while to figure out that one. Several interviews with musicians I thought had begun inauspiciously when I handed the artist my meishi only to receive ...