16
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.
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.
The Tokyo Rocks festival, which had been scheduled for May 11 and 12, was an ambitious attempt to bring big-name overseas artists such as Blur, Primal Scream and My Bloody Valentine together with a range of Japanese acts. On March 31, it was announced ...
Spring is here and May is the last month before festival season really swings into gear. Before you start saving money for Fuji Rock or SummerSonic, there’s a few shows you may want to check out. One of the most highly sought-after tickets is ...
At a time when stories about declining music sales are frequent and major labels aren’t investing in new talent, hearing about an indie label like Playwright is music to the ears. The young jazz label’s first release came out in October, and in the ...
“Before the gig, we were quite intimidated: a lowly rock band performing in front of a god. After, we found we could do it, and that was the turning point for us.” Going back to at least when Paul the Apostle saw the light ...
Odds are, Japan Times reader, that you do not like Kis-My-Ft2. Maybe you’ve been unable to escape the bleating “Wanna Beeee!!!” while out strolling in Shibuya, or maybe they lost you at, “From the people who brought you SMAP and Arashi!” So this review ...
The first song I ever made — and I’m willing to wager many who graduated high school in the mid 2000s share this experience — was using Apple’s GarageBand, a software application that lets people make music on their computers. “I made a killer ...
Tokyo Symphony Orchestra has returned to its home at Muza Kawasaki Symphony Hall. The orchestra was homeless for two years after the hall in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture, was severely damaged by the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011. On the afternoon of ...
For a music fan wanting to explore jazz for the first time, an ideal starting point may be the current chart-toppers, which includes Robert Glasper, Esperanza Spalding and Jose James. Alternatively, he or she may choose to start with the classics, diving into the ...
Japan surpassed the United States with the world’s largest combined sales of physical and digital music in 2012, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said Monday. Japan marked $4.3 billion (¥425 billion) in sales of CDs and music downloads, trading places with the ...