Japan's rural towns have mainly been facing the same big challenge for the past decade: A migration to urban centers for work has left them with declining populations, which leads to a further decrease in job opportunities that makes them less attractive places to ...

Finding artistic freedom in New York, Osaka-born artist finds new expressions for Japanese-style painting.

I'm sitting in Koen-Dori Classics, a darkened club in the basement of a church on Koen-dori, in Tokyo's Shibuya district. The audience is small, seated in a few rows facing the performers at the front. Silence, then the performance begins. Textured sounds emanate from ...

'There are just so many records in Japan," says Yusuke Ogawa, owner of Universounds, a used record shop selling jazz, soul and funk in the Western suburbs of central Tokyo. Now, with the rise of internet sales as well as the increasingly interconnected music ...

Though Kenji Miyazawa was little-known in his lifetime, since his death he has been heralded as one of the most important Japanese poets of the early 20th century and one of Iwate Prefecture's most treasured sons. Miyazawa lived in and around Morioka for much ...

Hikaru Uzawa is a noh performer who marries her work within the traditional confines of the art form with performing in contemporary pieces internationally, bringing freshness to the traditional world of noh. Uzawa, 39, comes from a long line of noh performers. Her mother, Hisa ...

Featuring an astounding 480 prints, spanning the entire 70 years of Katushika Hokusai's career, the new Hokusai exhibition at the Mori Arts Center Gallery is a great overview for ukiyo-e fans.

Ko Ishikawa plays the sho, a bamboo free-reed mouth harp that first came to Japan from China in the Nara Period (710-794). Despite what you might expect, however, the way he plays the instrument isn't conventionally traditional. The sho is used in gagaku, a style ...

Composer and performer Ned Rothenberg has spent his career traversing different musical worlds. He has worked extensively as both a composer and performer in the jazz and improvisation scenes, playing alto saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet and the shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute. Rothenberg, 62, has ...

At the height of the splendor of the Heian Period (794-1185), lady-in-waiting to the Imperial Court, Murasaki Shikibu, wrote "The Tale of Genji," the story of imperial officer Hikaru Genji falling in and out of love with his various suitors. After centuries of war, ...