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P/CLOUDY
NTT DoCoMo Inc., despite being Japan’s biggest mobile phone carrier, has been struggling against tough smartphone competition from KDDI Corp. and Softbank Corp., which is leading in that area. But one edge that the cellphone behemoth — it has more than 60 million subscribers ...
Throughout most of Japan, June is the rainy season. While all that rainfall is great for rice paddies so that we can have delicious new harvest rice in the fall, it makes it a rather dull month for seasonal produce: The summer’s bounty of ...
If you don’t get into the ring once or twice, then you’re a coward, Geoffrey Ima says as he describes people’s attitudes toward boxing in his hometown in Uganda. Ima has been in the ring hundreds of times and came to love boxing so ...
Claude Regy says the team at the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) threw him the “best birthday party ever” when he arrived in Japan just days after the actual May 1 occasion. The 90-year-old French director is hoping for an even better birthday gift, ...
The 27-year-old defender says he was ready for a change of scenery after helping Sanfrecce Hiroshima win theJ. League title last season.
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 front of him. The flurry of ...
Tokyo’s Shimokitazawa neighborhood is one of the most important places for indie music in the city. A lively suburb at ...
Students are counting down the days till school lets out, while urban commuters are starting to sweat the impending heat. ...
It’s fitting that I should be meeting Terre Thaemlitz on May 1, International Workers’ Day — she wryly refers to herself as a “feminist Marxist” before we begin our interview in proper. Thaemlitz, who produces music under her real name, the moniker DJ Sprinkles ...
Over the course of its six-year existence, Flau Records has carved out an identity as a record label offering intimate music. The actual sonic styles of the artists represented by the acts signed to the border-hopping imprint differ — some make proper songs, some ...
There were some curious rumors flying around prior to the release of “5th Dimension,” the second album by idol quintet Momoiro Clover Z, some of them intriguing (“It’s going to be a concept album”) and some worrying (longtime producer Kenichi “Hyadain” Maeyamada reportedly called ...
One of the highlights of my Golden Week this year was a concert by the Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Jazz Orchestra at Blue Note in Tokyo. Reuniting her big band for the first time in a decade, Akiyoshi rolled back the clock with a superb ...
As cities, Tokyo and Los Angeles could not be more different. But as creative places, both cities resonate with one another as creative partners.
“I hadn’t been anywhere before last year, I’d hardly left England. And now I’m going to Japan. I never thought I’d be going to a place like that. I think it is going to blow my mind.” Jake Bugg is getting used to going ...
Whether it’s an annual soapbox derby or sending a man to the edge of space just because they can, energy-drink manufacturers Red Bull have never been afraid to throw their cash at projects that range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Red Bull Music ...
One decision that faces jazz musicians toward the start of their careers is whether to continue the traditions of what’s gone before them or to try and strike out in a new direction. Pianist Yuki Futami, 26, has chosen the former path and has ...
Pianist Junko Onishi will come out of retirement to perform one more time, at the finale of this year’s Saito Kinen Festival Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture. According to a statement released Friday, the 46-year-old musician was convinced to come back to the stage by ...
Last September, the European Commission and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission approved Universal Music Group’s buyout of EMI. Since then, the two record companies have been merging their operations worldwide. In Japan, the combined Universal-EMI entity will have a market share of between 15 ...
Fans of the legendary Swedish disco group ABBA can hardly wait: In just a few weeks, Stockholm will open the doors to the world’s first museum dedicated to the iconic foursome. After “ABBA The Movie” in 1977, the “Mamma Mia” musical and movie, and ...
For Japanese jazz musicians these days, going to the United States to further mastery of the genre is a much-pursued rite of passage. This route has enabled a number of acts to gain international recognition and success.