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August 16, 2025
 

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James Hadfield
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Feb 25, 2011
Artist-curated festival sets new rules
"It's Auschwitz with good music," jokes Nick Cave at the start of "All Tomorrow's Parties," a 2009 documentary released to mark the 10th anniversary of the music festival of the same name. It's a tasteless description for an impeccably tasteful event, one that has become a bastion for left-of-center...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jan 14, 2011
More than words: Triune Gods' rap speaks volumes
Five years ago, Masayuki Yoshimoto found himself rapping at a gig in a Vancouver basement. Few of the crowd had ever heard of MC Sibitt, as he likes to be known, and even fewer could understand anything he was saying, but they seemed to appreciate it all the same. Afterward, one question kept coming...
CULTURE / Music
Dec 17, 2010
Kara "Girl's Talk" ; 4Minute "Diamond"
There's been a lot of hand-wringing this year about South Korea threatening to overtake Japan in everything from international diplomacy to technology. In pop music, though, it's already happened. The chart-topping success of now-defunct boy band TVXQ (known as Tohoshinki in Japan) was just a prelude...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Dec 10, 2010
Owen Pallett
At the tail end of last year, Canadian musician Owen Pallett issued a brief statement that he would be "voluntarily retiring" his stage name. For the previous five years, the songwriter and violin virtuoso had been producing ornate orchestral pop under the moniker Final Fantasy, a reference to the Japanese...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 24, 2010
Hard-knock life leads to magic music
In 2004, Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye ditched their respectable jobs in France and headed to Kinshasa. In the ruined capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country just emerging from one of postcolonial Africa's worst conflicts, they felt strangely at home. "We were like mad dogs in...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Aug 6, 2010
Hippies and hipsters brave a soggy Fuji Rock
When you're talking about a music festival whose inaugural event was literally wiped out by a typhoon, it can feel a bit petty to complain about the weather. All the same, campers arriving at Fuji Rock Festival in Naeba on Thursday last week might have hoped for a warmer welcome than the torrential downpour...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Aug 6, 2010
Thoughts on Fuji — Dirty Projectors, Ozomatli, !!! and Yeasayer
Dave Longstreth, Dirty Projectors You mentioned during your show that it felt pretty early to be rocking out . . .
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music / A SCORCHING SUMMER SCHEDULE
Jul 2, 2010
Fuji Rock Festival: Atoms For Peace
It sounded like a practical joke at first: Radiohead's Thom Yorke starting a band with frat-funk bassist Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers? But after a string of successful dates in the United States, including California's Coachella Festival, it's clear that Atoms for Peace mean business — and know...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jun 25, 2010
Asian Kung-Fu Generation "Magic Disk"
When The Japan Times asked a bunch of musicians last December to name the most influential Japanese artist from the past decade, Asian Kung-Fu Generation's Masafumi Goto went for Shutoku Mukai. It was a telling, if not particularly surprising, choice. Goto and Co. were quick to pick up the baton from...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Mar 12, 2010
DJ Yogurt & Koyas: "Chill Out"
British dance duo The KLF birthed a monster with their 1990 album "Chill Out." A 44-minute ambient collage that mixed snatches of the group's own material with field recordings and samples of Elvis, throat singers and Fleetwood Mac, it would become the de facto comedown soundtrack for a generation of...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Mar 5, 2010
Shibusashirazu Orchestra set to sprawl
Things got off to a memorable start at England's Glastonbury Festival in 2002. Revelers were roused from their tents on the first morning to find the main Pyramid Stage overrun by a 40-strong Japanese big band, complete with costumed performance artists, butoh and go-go dancers. The late radio DJ John...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jan 29, 2010
Tomori "Utagoe no Minato"
Would it be premature to hail this as the best early-Showa period album of 2010? Osaka duo Tomari's debut album pays little heed to the stylistic advances of the past half-century, turning instead to the music of prewar Japan for inspiration. It's a sound that the band describes as kakuu no kayou (literally,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Nov 13, 2009
Warp Records hits the big 2-0
Sheffield has come on a long way over the past 20 years. England's one-time "City of Steel" was, in the dying days of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's era, a pretty grim place to be, its factories shuttered and its high streets desolate. Today, it presents a cleaner, more affluent — and, some might...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jul 31, 2009
Running around the many stages
If you want to get a sense of the sprawling possibilities at Fuji Rock, just look at Rafven's schedule. The former street band from Gothenburg, Sweden, managed to play no less than nine times during the festival, bringing their exuberant brand of gypsy-style revelry to a string of different stages both...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jul 17, 2009
Dick El Demasiado
Dick El Demasiado is, by his own admission, an impostor. Born Dick Verdult in the Netherlands in 1954, the musician and media artist has become a pivotal figure on Argentina's experimental music scene thanks to an elaborate hoax.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jul 10, 2009
Amami Total Solar Eclipse Festival
It's a promoter's nightmare: an event which must be held in one of the most remote parts of the country, where the centerpiece occurs on a weekday morning, with no chance of rescheduling. Then again, when you're talking about the longest total solar eclipse of the century, certain concessions must be...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jul 3, 2009
Sheena Ringo
Following Sheena Ringo can be a frustrating business. Her third album, 2003's "Karuki Zamen Kuri no Hana" ("Lime, Semen, Chestnut Blossoms"), ranks as one of the most wildly ambitious pop records of the past decade, which made it all the more confounding when she ditched her solo career the following...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jun 26, 2009
TsuShiMaMiRe "A, Umi da"
"You're pretty stinky, aren't you? Well, I'm gonna love you anyway," sings TsuShiMaMiRe's guitarist/vocalist Mari on "Mike Smell Kunkun." It takes a brief moment to realize that she's talking to her microphone, not some hygienically challenged boyfriend.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
May 29, 2009
Brahman
You might expect a band named after the Sanskrit term for "absolute reality" to be a bit, well, pretentious. But if their moniker is evocative of patchouli, long beards and even longer guitar solos, Brahman's music remains firmly grounded.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Feb 20, 2009
Ego-Wrappin' and The Gossip of Jaxx "Ego-Wrappin' and The Gossip of Jaxx"
When Ego-Wrappin' performed on Asahi TV's "Music Station" show in July last year, singer Yoshie Nakano started their set by planting a kiss right on the camera lens, leaving a smudge of lipstick behind. It was the kind of insouciant gesture that the band do well: While their fusion of jazz, rock and...
The indelible memory of being a part of Unit 731
Hideo Shimizu, 95, says he cannot forget seeing the prisoners' bloody wills scribbled on the walls of prison cells at Unit 731 in 1945.
Japanese star convicted of indecent assault in Hong Kong
J-pop idol Kenshin Kamimura leaves the West Kowloon Law Courts on bail in Hong Kong on Wednesday, after he was found guilty of indecent assault of a woman who worked as his interpreter at a restaurant in Mong Kok district in March this year.
Tens of thousands left stranded at Osaka Expo by train service interruption
Visitors rest inside the Osaka Expo venue early Thursday morning
Welcoming foreign residents benefits Japan, three quarters of economists say
The streets of Tokyo's Ginza district in April. The number of foreign residents in Japan hit a record high at 3.76 million as of the end of last year, comprising just over 3% of the population.
Hiker missing in Hokkaido after bear attack found dead
The Rausu mountain range at Hokkaido's Shiretoko National Park. A man in his 20s who went missing after being attacked by a bear while hiking on Mount Rausu has been found dead.
The indelible memory of being a part of Unit 731
Hideo Shimizu, 95, says he cannot forget seeing the prisoners' bloody wills scribbled on the walls of prison cells at Unit 731 in 1945.
Will Ishiba's critics be able to garner enough support for a leadership race?
Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba's political survival likely hinges on whether a leadership race will take place within the Liberal Democratic Party following its decision to have its election committee canvass the opinions of party members and prefectural chapters on the subject.
Hidden rosters and the legacy of Japan’s germ warfare
Katsutoshi Takegami, 77, in his storehouse attic where he discovered his father's Unit 1644 documents
Osaka Expo highlights the challenge of holding events in Japan's scorching summer
People huddle near a large fan blowing icy-cold mist at the Osaka Expo on July 12. Amid Japan's relentless summer heat, organizes have put myriad measures in place in order to keep guests safe.
At Himawari Shokudo 2, Italian food with a Japanese soul
At Himawari Shokudo 2, chef Hozumi Tanaka serves Italian-inspired fare with a focus on Toyama produce, such as this appetizer of lightly blanched "hotaru ika" (firefly squid) served atop mixed wild plants and a crepe prepared from "yamato-imo" yam.

Podcast

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.
Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Longform

Members of the nonprofit group Japan Youth Memorial Association search for the remains of dead soldiers in a cave in Okinawa Prefecture in February.
The long search for Japan’s lost soldiers
By Tomoko Otake

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Looking ahead to Yokohama’s Green × Expo 2027
Looking ahead to Yokohama’s Green × Expo 2027

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