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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.
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, though, as he is here to ...
Sitting in an interview room at the Bunkamura cultural complex in Tokyo's Shibuya district, María Pagés leans forward, smiles and ...
If anyone understands the truth in the phrase, “It doesn’t hurt to ask” — it’s Alexandra Rutter. The 23-year-old cofounder ...
Ask your average Japanese person or non-native Japanophile to name a “traditional” form of domestic theater and the classics such as kabuki and noh would feature prominently.
Ahead of their current Taiwan tour, Yuzuki Reon, the current top otokoyaku (male-role actress) with the Takarazuka Revue, took time out between rehearsals at the city-center Tokyo Takarazuka Theater to share with readers of The Japan Times something of her view from such a ...
Always keen to break new ground, Keiko Miyata, artistic director of the New National Theatre Tokyo (NNTT), has created a series titled “With: linking theater” as the centerpiece of this season’s program. In this, she has lined up three appetizing collaborations by asking playwrights ...
“If I thought too much about my future plans, I would kind of get stuck,” says Natsumi Abe. “So I just try to concentrate on the next day’s work and do it as well as I can.” It’s a serious statement on work ethic, ...
The Kabukiza is back — with big ambitions and aspirations to make the nation’s classical theatrical entertainment more attractive to a 21st-century audience. The reopened kabuki theater — now reconstructed for the fifth time — in the upscale shopping-entertainment district of Ginza, will roll ...
“Sumidagawa Hana no Goshozome” (“The Sumida River Adorned with Cherry Blossoms”) by Tsuruya Namboku IV (1755-1829), now showing at the National Theater of Japan, was written to be a blockbuster. It was created for the Ichimura-za theater in Edo in 1814, when kabuki was ...
The play begins with Matsuwaka (Nakamura Hayato, 19) of the Kyoto-based Yoshida family. He is disguised as Yorikuni of the Otomo family, who is the fiance to princess Sakurahime (Nakamura Kotaro, 19) of the Iruma family. Sakurahime is also the younger sister of Matsukawa’s ...
If you had a son or daughter who announced they wanted to be a stage actor, whatever would you say to them? In Japan today, as in centuries past, this still remains a dreaded scenario for many “respectable” parents hoping to raise children who ...
Without doubt, Takahiro Fujita is the most prominent newcomer in the world of Japanese contemporary theater. To a considerable extent that’s because the 27-year-old playwright/director has an unusual trademark style — to create works that often have the same lyrical phrases and series of ...
A play about William Adams, thought to be the first Englishman to set foot in Japan, is being staged in London to mark the start of J400, a yearlong series of events to celebrate 400 years of Anglo-Japanese relations. “Anjin: The Shogun and the ...
An 18-year-old high school student won third place at the prestigious Prix de Lausanne ballet competition in Switzerland over the weekend. “I am satisfied with my performance, but I can’t still believe I became one of the top finishers,” said Masaya Yamamoto of Nomi, ...
If art's purpose is to ask the relevant questions, then British-Bangladeshi dancer Akram Khan successfully interrogates humanity — and himself — with his latest production, "Desh."