Philip Brasor - The Japan Times

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Apr 1, 2001

Problems can't be solved until they're acknowledged, and it is considered the job of the media to bring hidden social problems into the open. The media, however, can't be counted on to provide perspective, which means that what are often perceived as new problems are actually old ones.

CULTURE / Music

Mar 16, 2001

Post-rockers toil in obscurity and they like it like that

Anonymity is the nemesis of pop. History is filled with earnest, well-meaning bands who did whatever they could to keep the music up front and the personalities in the background, often to the point where they wouldn't even reveal their names (like early Pavement). But unless you intend to toil in obscurity for the rest of your days or advance anonymity itself as your main selling point (the Residents), you're destined to fail.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Mar 15, 2001

Soccer lottery: A tax to fund bureaucrats' whims

The worst thing about the new soccer lottery system may be its name. "Toto" is taken from the Italian word totocalcio, which is the name of a similar lottery that has been in place in Italy for more than 50 years.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Mar 1, 2001

NHK's hollow take on easy-money bubble era

What's impressive about the new Steven Soderbergh film, "Traffic," which opens here in April, is how thoroughly it presents all the ramifications of America's drug war by exclusively dramatic means: no charts, no explanations of cause and effect, no polemics. The movie's three separate plot vectors intersect only incidentally, but together they show how the drug war is actually fought by the people on both sides of the front line and, by clear implication, how it can never be won.

CULTURE / Music

Feb 16, 2001

Black Eyed Peas try to bring it all back

Whither hip hop? Since it's still relatively young, a better question might be: When will it become as redundant as rock? I think it already has, and not because, musically at least, hip hop is by definition a pastiche, but because thematically it's stuck in a rut.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Feb 15, 2001

NTT's still calling all the shots

As is apparent to anyone who owns a computer in Japan, the government's stated aim of making the nation an IT powerhouse will come to nothing until telecommunications connection fees become more rational.

CULTURE / Music

Feb 9, 2001

Richard Thompson defies death and lives to tell

By his own estimate, Richard Thompson played about 100 concerts last year, "which means you're on the road for about 150 days."

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Feb 1, 2001

Making work a lifestyle choice instead of just making a living

In an effort to get some idea of why the suicide rate among college students is on the rise, the weekly magazine AERA recently sent a reporter to the Muroran Institute of Technology, where there have been seven student suicides in the last two years.

CULTURE / Music

Jan 26, 2001

ATDI: scary monsters and super afros

If there's any doubt as to how beholden Rolling Stone magazine is to the record industry (or, for that matter, Hollywood), all one has to do is take a look at their Best Album list for 2000 and note that there isn't an indie release in the whole batch. What's more, the best new band is At the Drive-In, which is sort of like Kazuhiro Sasaki and Hideo Nomo winning rookie of the year honors in the United States despite the fact that both had already pitched many seasons in Japan. You ain't nothin' till you play for the Major Leagues.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Jan 18, 2001

Meet your future friend, Mr. Roboto

One of the formative experiences of my childhood was the New York World's Fair of 1962-63, where America's great and beneficent corporations introduced consumers to the future. The memory that sticks with me most is of Bell Telephone's "picture phone," which we were told would be widely in use by the mid-1980s.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Jan 4, 2001

Blips that stayed on the media radar

Media Persons of the Year: Yasuo Tanaka and Shintaro Ishihara

CULTURE / Music

Dec 29, 2000

Hipster Arthur H sings in his own lingua franca

The late '50s and early '60s was an interesting time for American musical tastes. Listeners who considered themselves hip embraced a wide variety of styles, from the calypso of Harry Belafonte to the bossa nova of Antonio Carlos Jobim and even the chanson of Jacques Brel. If they listened to American pop it wasn't Elvis or Little Richard, but Nina Simone, who dared expand her repertoire beyond jazz to include spirituals and art songs.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Dec 21, 2000

Success of discount barns should come as no surprise

" 'Tis the season," and while many a crabby gaijin points out that Japan's decidedly commercial spin on Christmas excludes its religious meaning, shopping makes a lot of people happy, so why knock it?

CULTURE / Music

Dec 10, 2000

Unplugged (but stuffed up)

Elliott Smith Which came first, "MTV Unplugged," or the tendency for singer-songwriters to do solo acoustic tours? Ostensibly, these artists (usually guys) say they want to explore pure songs without the production distractions that may have made the songs popular in the first place (personally, I can't separate the genius of Elvis Costello's early work from the contribution made by the Attractions). But I suspect the real reason is that some singer-songwriters are tired of hauling a band around and sharing decisions.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Dec 7, 2000

SMAP star finds true love, new role

When the public recently learned that 28-year-old idol Takuya Kimura was marrying singer Shizuka Kudo, who is already four months pregnant with his child, the SMAP-man's image immediately changed from sex symbol to . . . well, actually, the image still seems to be under construction.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Nov 30, 2000

With election at a stalemate, coverage shifts into overkill

As is usually the case when I'm in California, the talk turned to real estate. A 75-year-old retiree told me exactly how much it cost him to buy all the cacti surrounding his pool. A stockbroker from Seattle said the house she recently bought was originally owned by Col. Tom Parker and had a TV room that was specially built for Elvis Presley. Everyone talked about someone named Sven, who was moving out of a beautiful home down the street to a smaller, less attractive and more expensive place 10 blocks away simply because it was a snazzier neighborhood.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Nov 16, 2000

Social guilt: putting the blame on Mom

Though the media agrees with the government that Japan's flagging birthrate is a bad thing, they seem determined to make potential parents dread the prospect of raising kids in a world where every wrong choice, major or minor, could turn their offspring into criminals, deviants, or just plain miserable people.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Nov 2, 2000

English teaching comes home to roost as foreign corporations invade Japan

When I was teaching English to Japanese business people in the late '80s, the main purpose was to prepare them for overseas assignments. In many cases, the students were not management people, but technicians and blue-collar workers. They were being sent to the U.S. or Europe to train employees in factories that their companies had either set up or bought outright from local companies.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Oct 19, 2000

Talking head Tanaka wows 'em in Nagano

Yasuo Tanaka, candidate for the governorship of Nagano Prefecture, was supposed to meet voters at 2:30 p.m. at a shopping arcade in downtown Nagano, but it was a long arcade. A campaign worker wearing a bright orange windbreaker was handing out literature in front of Ito Yokado. "I think it's been changed," he said, sounding as if he didn't want to be taken at his word. "Now it's scheduled for 3:30 in front of 82 Bank," which happened to be all the way at the other end of the arcade. There, another campaign worker said, when asked about the relocation, "Really? I thought so, but I wasn't sure."

CULTURE / Music

Oct 17, 2000

Badly drawn but beautifully sketched

Until I saw Damon Gough, the singer-songwriter better known as Badly Drawn Boy, in concert, it never occurred to me that the audience might be there for the performer's amusement rather than the other way around. At one point, Gough started handing out roses to women in the front row while he serenaded them freestyle. I couldn't help thinking of Jonathan Richman when he gave a flower to a guy and sang, "I'm not bisexual/but I appreciate the male population."

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