Music

The late Donald Richie, a legendary chronicler of 20th century Japan, once said that to accept life in Tokyo, you must embrace constant change and not give in to nostalgia. In the 60 years he lived in this great city he saw multiple transformations ...

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 ...

The past few years have been a boom time for Japanese reissues, as labels dredge up everything from ambient obscurities to glossy disco-pop for the benefit of listeners who missed them first time around. For Yukihiro Takahashi, it's all a bit confusing. "Do you understand ...

Yellow Magic Orchestra made its 1980 debut on the legendary American dance show “Soul Train” performing a cover of “Tighten Up” by Archie Bell & the Drells, two years after the November 1978 release of the trio’s eponymous first album Dressed in logoed button-downs with ...

Fresh from a 29-date tour of the British Isles, and celebrating their 50th anniversary year, Philadelphia soul icons The Stylistics are setting up camp in Japan for a 12-date tour of three cities: Yokohama (Dec. 9), Tokyo (Dec. 10 and between Dec. 18 and ...

On the 40th anniversary of singer-songwriter Mariya Takeuchi's debut, The Japan Times sits down with the musician responsible for such classics as "Sutekina Holiday," "September" and the track that has taken the internet by storm, "Plastic Love."

Throngs of fans packed Tokyo Dome on Tuesday and Wednesday to watch K-pop group BTS perform songs from across its five-year career. The crowd cheered, bought merchandise and the two days offered the seven-member group some respite from a week of scandal. Things kicked off ...

Kyary Pamyu Pamyu's trip to the Museum of Death in Hollywood proved to be a 2018 highlight for the 25-year-old J-pop star. "I thought it would be about murder and crime, but it was actually about everything related to death," she tells The Japan Times. ...

When Beverly Caimen moved from the Philippines to Japan in 2016 she was a relative unknown who could barely speak the language. Several months later, however, an unexpected encounter with actor Shun Oguri drastically changed her life. That meeting led to him introducing Beverly, as ...

With its rapid-fire rapping, lyrics that are often impenetrable to outsiders and raw, synthetic timbres, grime was never an obvious candidate for international success. But from east London's tower blocks to the stages of California's Coachella festival, the genre has grown from humble origins ...

For the past 16 years, Tokyo's SuperDeluxe has been a place where it felt like almost anything could happen, and it quite often did. So when the venue announced a few weeks ago that it would be closing in January, after its building was ...