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The consumption tax increase next April will hit every household in Japan hard, with many people's financial future hanging on whether their wages rise enough to offset the impact of the hike, experts say.
Every parent is all too familiar with The Tantrum. The screaming, the flailing arms, the angry head butting — and the timing (normally in the most inconvenient public place possible).
International events undermine Japan's democracy. Shame on the International Olympic Committee for being a party to it.
Tucked away behind the main museums in Ueno, the Tokyo University Art Museum may not be on most people’s radar, but it is definitely one of the city’s top museums in terms of curatorial quality. Whenever I go there, I am always delighted by ...
Francisco Liriano showed up at PNC Park on Tuesday afternoon in a suit with his suitcase packed for a trip St. Louis. The message reverberated through the Pittsburgh Pirates clubhouse. After 21 years away from the playoffs, it was time for the best story ...
Ten-thousand Kumamons doing an elaborate Busby Berkeley-style dance routine to Kyu Sakamoto’s international 1963 hit “Sukiyaki”? A 100-meter Hatsune Miku towering over the stadium while 80,000 spectators crane their necks ...
“We’d be playing someone’s basement in America …” “And we only had five or six people there …” “We had some nights where the audience was zero.” As Yasuko “Yako” ...
A best-of album is not what you’d expect from an artist who has been around for five years. But that’s exactly what Ramona Gonzalez, who records under the moniker Nite ...
Ten years ago, Suede was in the process of fizzling out to a backdrop of apathy. For a band whose ...
Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe reportedly once said “God is in the details.” Conductor Seiji Ozawa would literally agree. ...
Noise — vast, enveloping noise — is at the core of My Bloody Valentine’s music. Halfway through “You Made Me Realise,” the quartet lands on a single chord that proceeds to suck the entire song into a gawping, sense-scrambling maw of distortion. On the ...
October seems to be a good time for indie music. A lot of the smaller artists that need to do the festival circuit in Britain and the United States take a break in September and October, which gives them the chance to pop over ...
With 90 minutes to go before the start of the Rock God Dam music festival, organizer Nakako Isoo is trying to find one of the headlining acts. She’s supposed to pick up Virginia band Suburban Living, but comes back to Shibuya club Vuenos alone. ...
As a model, Nadia Mladjao would have seen all there is in the world of luxury and excess. But the 27-year-old singer, better known as Imany, keeps it simple with her guitar on her debut album, “The Shape of a Broken Heart.” “What I ...
Maximum The Hormone’s sixth album, “Yoshu Fukushu,” proves its members know how to laugh at themselves. The four-piece have long been slapped with the “hardcore” and “nu-metal” tags, putting the band in the company of other such acts like Limp Bizkit and Korn, who ...
It’s getting harder to listen to netlabel-released albums in one sitting recently. Electronic-music compilation series “Fogpak” recently put out a collection featuring 48 different artists (should we call the Guinness people?). Now Tanukineiri Records has popped out “Tanukineiri Drink Sampler” — 90 minutes and ...
There’s nothing like a comeback story. This summer, Japan saw a return to the stage by Seiji Ozawa, one of the country’s most celebrated musicians. On Aug. 23, the 78-year-old maestro took up his baton at the Saito Kinen Festival Matsumoto, the event he ...
On seeing the lineup ahead of this year’s Tokyo Jazz Festival, my initial feeling was the organizers had maybe cast their net a bit too wide with the acts booked, but those fears were completely unfounded. With the festival being held on three main ...
A few weeks ago I was preparing to do a guest slot on InterFM’s “The Selector” program, which features music mavens sharing their favorite tracks. While I had a few tunes from the not-so-recent past in mind, I needed some newer stuff to round ...
So is this your first trip to Japan? Bassist Nikolai Eilertsen: For me, yes, but the other guys in the band have been before with different outfits. You had a real Hammond B3 on stage. You didn’t ship that over, did you? No, no. ...
This is your first time at Tokyo Jazz Festival, but not your first visit to Japan. What’s your overall impression? Trumpeter Eric Vloeimans: The audience is really enthusiastic and they’re very polite, and you see that jazz music is very popular here. It seems ...
Tres-men are made up of percussionist Takahiro “Matzz” Matsuoka, DJ Yoshijiro Sakurai and keyboardist Yusuke Nakamura. Your debut album came out in April, and here we are, five months later at Tokyo Jazz Festival. How did that come about? TM: We got the offer ...