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A sit-in by visa violators and their families entered its second day Tuesday in front of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau with protesters seeking government good will. The action at the bureau in Minato Ward is being organized by the Asian People’s Friendship Society, ...
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, ...
Takashi Miike's blood-soaked vengeance tale, one of two Japanese films being shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, draws the biggest boos so far, with critics savaging it as overacted and cliched.
Have you ever given your best effort while striving to achieve something but felt like what you were doing was futile? That’s the feeling I’m getting about Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Olympics. With just over three months to go until the IOC ...
Sekaitekina Band are pretty optimistic. Their name basically translates as “global band,” and while it may sound a bit lame at first, you can’t fault them for aiming high. Debut albums run the risk of being messy affairs, especially in Japan, where young acts ...
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. ...
Bass advocates Diskotopia are a small group of producers and DJs who have been holding events since 2005. Their main focus is the ever-expanding area of dance music that uses heavy bass sounds, including dubstep and bassline-house. Originally based in Osaka, they moved operations ...
Alternative-rock subgenres have been sabotaged by J-rock bands whose lack of uniqueness has made a once-exciting genre stale. This year, though, 0.8 Byo to Shogeki recaptured that alternative spirit from the 1990s with “1-bo 2-bo 3-bo 4-bo 5-bo 6-bo Toyo no Techno.” The track ...
As member of the ultra-hip Naruyoshi Kikuchi Dub Sextet, Shinpei Ruike has developed an instantly identifiable sound and is arguably the best trumpeter of his generation in Japan. “Sector b,” his second album as leader, shows the full spectrum of Ruike’s sound. Each of ...
Pioneers in their own respective musical fields, Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) and Ryuichi Sakamoto began their exploration of sound and visual arts, evocatively titled the Virus Series, in 2002. Nine years on and the fifth and final installment of the collection, “Summvs,” reaches ...
AKB48 is not a band, or even a pop group: AKB48 is a hate crime. With “Koko ni Ita Koto,” pop music has reached its lowest ebb. And that is precisely why this album is not my favorite of the year, but the one ...
My favorite Japanese album of 2011 sounds even better live. “Magnetic Soil,” the eighth album from self-described death-jazz act Soil & “Pimp” Sessions, further proved that this Tokyo-based sextet belongs in a class all its own. However, it was the way the band performed ...
For those not into the usual Japanese holiday traditions of eating Christmas cake, watching the “Kohaku” music show on TV, and quiet nights with the family, luckily Japan’s rockers aren’t taking time off. December is filled with must-see gigs. The party starts early with ...
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 — ...
Widely recognized as one of the most innovative drummers in the Japanese underground music scene, Tatsuya Yoshida spent nearly two decades playing as part of the bass and drums duo, Ruins. During his time in the group, Yoshida worked with four different bassists. After ...
The promotional flyers for the new EP from JinnyOops!, “Mother Shock!,” come with a strange tagline: Minna Okan kara Umarerunchauka? You can translate that from Osaka-dialect Japanese into English as: “Isn’t everyone born from a mother?” This fixation on mothers and birth may stem ...