Shaun McKenna has worked as an editor at The Japan Times since 2007. He currently helms the Music and Events sections at the newspaper. When he isn’t attending concerts in Tokyo, he is often on the hunt for “the perfect iced tea.”
For Shaun McKenna's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
There are some genres of music that Japan excels in. Recently, acts here have been appropriating the dance music styles of dubstep and juke to create a sound that feels like a real contribution to the global music scene. Before all this, though, there ...
I remember heading to the pub years ago, after teaching English at a high school, to swap horror stories with my peers. Baye McNeil's "Loco in Yokohama" is, in that sense, a trip down memory lane. After receiving good reviews from his self-published debut, "Hi! ...
The standard opening line when speaking to someone about the TV series "Game of Thrones" basically amounts to a spoiler alert. It's no different when talking to actress Michelle Fairley, who plays Catelyn Stark in the popular HBO cable series. "I've seen Season 3 and I've ...
Born in Nottingham, England, Mark Birtles began DJing in Leeds before coming to Japan in 2008. He is one half of the Tokyo Indie events team, which has hosted DJ gigs with touring bands such as My Bloody Valentine, Metronomy, Mystery Jets and Yeah ...
Students are counting down the days till school lets out, while urban commuters are starting to sweat the impending heat. Summer is coming, and a sure sign of that is that music festivals are starting to kick up around the country. The month starts off ...
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 overtures ...
Laurent Fintoni was visiting Japan in March 2011 when the Great East Japan Earthquake struck. The 33-year-old writer and DJ quickly contacted friends in the music scene here and abroad to produce "Nihon Kizuna," one of the first albums to aid disaster relief. Two years ...
After rock group Jake Stone Garage hit the final chord of one of their powerful guitar-heavy songs, the crowd let out a few hoots and applauded politely. For a Western band this may have seemed a bit unreceptive, but luckily Jake Stone Garage are from ...
My Bloody Valentine bassist Debbie Googe manned the decks for a rare DJ set at a Tokyo Indie event in Tokyo on Friday. The acclaimed alt-rock band was in Japan to play sold-out shows in Osaka and Tokyo in support of its new album "m ...
The new year is starting out with a slew of potentially great gigs throughout the country. The most anticipated of these is probably Patti Smith and her Band's seven-city tour, which starts in Sendai on Jan. 22 (Sendai Rensa; 7:30 p.m. start; ¥7,000 in advance; ...
