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Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jan 27, 2015

Sugar's Campaign come up with some sweet city pop for debut album 'Friends'

Seiho Hayakawa and Takuma Hosokawa think modern pop music is "grotesque," but that's exactly how they wanted the debut album by their band Sugar's Campaign to sound.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books / ESSENTIAL READING FOR JAPANOPHILES
Jan 24, 2015

The Ink Dark Moon

No other period in Japan's literary history was as dominated by women as the Heian Period (794-1185). Most Japanophiles know names such as Sei Shonagon ("The Pillow Book") or Murasaki Shikibu ("The Tale of Genji") for their contributions to the world of literature, but Izumi Shikibu (Shikibu is a title,...
Japan Times
JAPAN / CHUBU CONNECTION
Jan 23, 2015

Japan, Korea scholars join hands on history in fence-mending bid

Researchers in Japan and South Korea are working together to file a joint request to get historic materials documenting the Korean missions to Japan placed in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register to help improve the strained diplomatic relationship.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 22, 2015

'The Genealogy of Fantasy: From Goya to Klinger'

Through works from its own collection, The Museum of Modern Art is introducing an 18th- and 19th-century fantasy world of Western prints at its Kamakura Annex.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 22, 2015

'Yokoo Tadanori: Great Nirvana'

This collection of more than 300 nehanzo (nirvana statues) was originally accumulated by the artist Tadanori Yokoo.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jan 20, 2015

Perseverance wins Ningen Isu an encore

Kimonos and heavy metal. It's a combination that few groups have pulled off convincingly. While the aesthetic may have been used last year to turn (or bang) more than a few heads in the West by heavy metal idol unit Babymetal, the tiny trio certainly wasn't the first to attempt it.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jan 20, 2015

Shigge "SunLimeJuice"

Since emerging in the summer of 2013, Fukuoka label Yesterday Once More has made some of the country's most intriguing electronic music in recent memory. The artists hovering around this Internet imprint embraced styles that have been in vogue with the Japanese do-it-yourself dance scene for a while...
COMMENTARY
Jan 19, 2015

New Sri Lankan president has delicate balancing act

Sri Lankans have sprung a surprise with their commitment to democracy. They have thrown out a strongman president who had brought an end to a three-decade-long civil war and restored high economic growth.
CULTURE / Books
Jan 17, 2015

The City that Silk Built

Kyoto has long been generous to its writers, stretching from Murasaki Shikibu, with "The Tale of Genji," right through to Yukio Mishima, with "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion." The poet Matsuo Basho also penned several memorable haiku while decamped here.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 16, 2015

Specter of fascist past haunts Europe's growing nationalism

The real aim of today's would-be authoritarians such as French far-right leader Marine Le Pen is to present themselves as legitimate leaders who are saying what the public really thinks but is afraid to say.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 15, 2015

Whistler: The misunderstood artistic rebel

Though his paintings may not look radical to us today, in his time, James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) often faced incomprehension — both through interpretations of his art and his own uncompromising stance toward it. Museumgoers in Japan now have a rare opportunity to decide for themselves the merits...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 15, 2015

'Fuji Paradigms: Visions of Mt. Fuji'

Mount Fuji, with its beautifully symmetrical ridge lines and snowy peak, has always attracted photographers from near and afar. With nearly 300 stills and posters from its collection, the Izu Photo Museum in Shizuoka celebrates this iconic landmark, charting its representation in the history of Japan....
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / FOREIGN AGENDA
Jan 14, 2015

A note of concern to wounded MLK from a friend in Japan

Throughout Martin Luther King Jr.'s pursuit of justice and equal rights for African-Americans, he knew he had the support and consideration of Japan through an old classmate who had decided to study abroad and broaden his cultural understanding.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Jan 10, 2015

Code + culture: New Internet artists from Japan

If the Internet is an ocean, why do we spend so much time floating on its surface? What's really going on down there? Not just in the deepest, darkest trenches, but among the forgotten protocols, faulty algorithms and emerging parameters outside the busy shipping lanes and far from the crowded life rafts...
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Jan 10, 2015

Modern technology aids whale research

In my last column of 2014, "Twelve ways to spend 2015 with nature," I mentioned the possibility of taking a whale-watching trip to the Ogasawara Islands. Ignore the international media hype about the country's pelagic whaling industry — it's a dying custom; instead, focus on the fact that Japan has...
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 2, 2015

Challenges of providing safe water in Africa

In Africa's developing countries, waste management often endangers health and the environment, yet it is given low priority by governments often besieged by other problems such as poverty, hunger, unemployment and war.
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 30, 2014

A great year for the far right

The far-right resurgence is impossible to miss, and 2014 will be remembered as the year extreme nationalists in Europe and Asia made a credible bid for power for the first time since the end of World War II.
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 30, 2014

Meet Asia's biggest losers in 2014

Warren Buffett wasn't the only bigwig in 2014 to get caught 'swimming naked when the tide rolls out.' The Sage of Omaha shared the year's losers' spotlight with a number of companies, politicians and corporate emperors.
COMMENTARY / World / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Dec 29, 2014

'Comfort women' politics in Japan, Korea, U.S.

Perhaps the wartime existence of 'comfort women' owes its notoriety in recent years to Japan's retroactive bad conscience, South Korean politics and the unwarranted U.S. propensity to be a moral scold.
Japan Times
BUSINESS / Companies
Dec 29, 2014

Sony's 'Interview' fetches $15 million online in four days

"The Interview" earned more than $15 million in online sales in its first four days of distribution as Sony bypassed a wide theater release amid concerns from major cinema chains about threats of violence.
CULTURE / Books
Dec 27, 2014

The Strange Library

Haruki Murakami's "The Strange Library" is a short story, not a novel. So why, one might wonder, has it been published as a single volume? Reading the story, two answers suggest themselves. The first is that, though it is short — 58 loosely printed pages of text — Murakami manages to endow those...
CULTURE / Books
Dec 27, 2014

Man'yo Luster

Man'yo Luster, by Susumu Nakanishi, Translated by Ian Hideo Levy, Photos by Hakudo Inoue.Pie Books, Poetry.
CULTURE / Art
Dec 25, 2014

'Ukiyo-e New Years Exhibition'

Ukiyo-e Ota Memorial Museum of Art will exhibit paintings from its collection, including works by Keisai Eisen (1790-1848), Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1865) and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858).
WORLD / Crime & Legal
Dec 24, 2014

Ceiling collapse leaves Chinese panty thief exposed

A Chinese man who stole hundreds of pieces of ladies' underwear had his secret exposed after an emergency exit ceiling where he had been storing his hoard collapsed, state media reported.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Dec 24, 2014

Review: TM Network at Tokyo International Forum

Just as the year drew to a close, so too did J-pop trio TM Network's touring schedule at the Tokyo International Forum's Hall A.
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Dec 20, 2014

The good, and not-so-good, reads from 2014

I was lucky enough to read a number of good and informative books on Japan in 2014, but also read my share of clunkers.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 18, 2014

The man who turned his modernist home into an art museum

It's not all roses being the director of an independent art museum, but for Toshio Hara, the human interaction of the art world is still a more attractive prospect than that of being a businessman. In 1979 he turned the family seat — a small cluster of white modernist buildings in a quiet residential...

Longform

Visitors walk past Sou Fujimoto's Grand Ring, which has been recognized as the largest wooden structure in the world.
Can a World Expo still matter? Japan is about to find out.