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Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Dec 15, 2011

X Japan's Yoshiki seeks a second coming

The setting is an upscale hotel ballroom. On a stage in the center of the room sit two crystal-clear transparent pianos, facing each other, and a mic stand. In a circle around the stage, facing inward: an audience. We'll come back to them in a minute. An octet and backing band occupy sub-stages on opposing...
CULTURE / Music
Dec 8, 2011

Forget Santa — spend the holidays at a live house

For those not into the usual Japanese holiday traditions of eating Christmas cake, watching the "Kohaku" music show on TV, and quiet nights with the family, luckily Japan's rockers aren't taking time off. December is filled with must-see gigs.
Japan Times
MULTIMEDIA
Dec 8, 2011

A look into Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

It is hard to think of fin de siecle Paris without recalling the dancing girls and dandies of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's colorful prints. It is equally difficult to imagine work by the artist not centered on the city's hedonistic and decadent nightlife.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 2, 2011

"Zohiko Urushi Art from the Mitsui Memorial Museum Collection"

By the late Edo Period (1603-1867), the Mitsui family had become one of the most powerful mercantile powers in Japan. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, their business became Mitsui Zaibatsu, a successful financial business conglomerate until its dissolution after World War II.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 2, 2011

"Collections III: Yasui Nakaji and His Age"

Hyogo Prefectural Museum presents the work of influential Japanese photographer, Nakaji Yasui (1903-1942), for its third exhibition in a series showcasing the museum's collection.
Japan Times
MULTIMEDIA
Nov 24, 2011

Dressed to impress Tokyo's art crowd

A life-size bucking brown horse, pieced together from old leather jackets. A loom operated by a Noah's Ark collection of polar bears, birds and other beasts. A fashion boutique till that scans barcodes to create a cacophony of musical sounds.
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 24, 2011

Lack of leadership hobbles Egypt's revolution

The man who taught me to sacrifice my heart for Egypt is dead," said Vivian Magdi, mourning her fiancé. Michael Mosad was killed in the Maspiro area Oct. 9, when an armored vehicle hit him during a protest called to condemn an attack on an Egyptian Church in the southern Aswan region. The protest left...
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / ON: DESIGN
Nov 22, 2011

Small surprises and understated brilliance

Spread a little light Idea International's new multipurpose LED interior lamp shows that just a little light goes a long way.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Nov 20, 2011

Memories of Mount Takao

Sometimes in the Japanese autumn, when the days are still warm and the air is beginning to smell of persimmons and fallen leaves, my mind stumbles across a day nearly 20 years ago now, and I turn the memory over and over as I try to make sense of how the time since then has passed.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Nov 18, 2011

'George Harrison: Living in the Material World' / 'Under Control'

Director Martin Scorsese was one of the first to score big with the rockumentary format with his 1978 film "The Last Waltz," which covered the farewell concert by The Band and their musician friends such as Neil Young and Van Morrison. He's kept a hand in it ever since, making boomer rock docs on Bob...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 17, 2011

'Irving Penn and Issey Miyake: Visual Dialogue'

21_21 Design Sight
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / TECH_JAPAN
Nov 16, 2011

Social-gaming and traditional media no longer deadly foes

Japan's two social-game-networking giants, Gree and Mobage, have been spending enormous amounts on producing TV advertising recently, and as a result they have each attracted approximately 20 percent of the population to their services, selling vast number of virtual items. In the West it is unusual...
EDITORIALS
Nov 15, 2011

Ocean awash with tsunami trash

Japan is a country where homeowners and shopkeepers sweep up in front every morning and garbage collection points are spick-and-span. Schoolchildren are taught to clean their classrooms. Cleanliness is one of Japanese culture's most strongly held values. So, it is maddening, and embarrassing, that an...
Japan Times
LIFE
Nov 13, 2011

In the wake of the Vikings

At both its western and eastern extremes some 10,700 km apart in France and the Russian Far East respectively, the great, fused supercontinent of Eurasia breaks into fragments, into not quite matching fringes of islands.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Nov 11, 2011

'Contagion' / 'Moneyball'

Cinema imagines the apocalypse on a regular basis, touching on everything from Mayan calendar-related polar shifts to the ever-popular walking dead. Few films, however, dare to deal with scenarios that could actually happen; that's what makes Steven Soderbergh's "Contagion," which looks at a deadly global...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Nov 11, 2011

An audience with Kyoko Kagawa

Kyoko Kagawa is among the fast dwindling number of living witnesses to Japanese cinema's Golden Age of the 1950s and '60s.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Nov 10, 2011

Casiokids won't waste a second while in Japan

With saucepans, a bowl, a wine-glass high-hat and some chopsticks to playfully clink them with, a cover version was born. Thinking it "too tricky to work out the chords to a Shiina Ringo song," it was with a cover of Kyu Sakamoto's "Sukiyaki" that Norwegian synth-pop four-piece Casiokids introduced themselves...
CULTURE / Books
Nov 6, 2011

Words for all seasons

THE UNDYING DAY: Poems by Hans Brinckmann. Trafford Publishing, 2011, 131pp., $14.50 (paperback) In person, Hans Brinckmann is a dapper European gent with the patrician manner of the well-practised host or master of ceremonies. Reading this book of time-seasoned verse, one suspects that he would be equally...
JAPAN / Media / Japan Pulse
Nov 1, 2011

More ways to try before you buy

Not sure if you're ready to Roomba? Trial offers let you take just about anything for a spin.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / LIGHT GIST
Oct 25, 2011

The ridiculously frightening world of Japanese spooks

Halloween is that time of the year when the occult, macabre and humorous come together to create a festival of fear and fun for all the family. A celebration of death and demons with its roots in pre-Christian Europe, the summer's-end spook-fest has morphed over the centuries into a highly commercialized...
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Oct 25, 2011

Feeling your way around the Tokyo National Museum

Next time you have a chance to visit the Tokyo National Museum (TNM) in Tokyo's Ueno district, before walking around that home to a vast and impressive collection of traditional Japanese paintings, sculptures and crafts, remember to make a quick stop in the room on the left of the foyer.
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / ON: DESIGN
Oct 25, 2011

The natural tide of the times

Back to basics Ki no Kami paper — the result of a collaboration between the Shiodome Innovation Studio (a creative unit that teams Japan's leading advertising agency, Dentsu, and Keio University's Shonan Fujisawa Campus with various creators) and the PaPaCo Yoshino wooden-toy maker — is designed...
CULTURE / Books
Oct 23, 2011

Documenting disaster

THE TOHOKU EARTHQUAKE and Tsunami, the Fukushima Nuclear Reactor, and How the World's Media Reported Them, by Eric Johnston. The Japan Times, 2011, 96 pp., ¥1,260 (paperback) Seven months after Japan's devastating March 11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters, the jury remains out on media reporting...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Oct 22, 2011

Briton aims to restore poets' peak to former glory

Nineteen university students and civic-minded Kyoto residents squat on a mountain pass on a cloudless afternoon in early October as a tall British poet, Stephen Gill, 58, reads from a collection of haiku.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 21, 2011

"Goya: Lights and Shadows. Masterpieces of the Museo del Prado"

One of the most important 19th-century artists of Spain, the Romanticist painter and printmaker Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) is considered one of the last Old Masters as well as a pioneer of modern art. He helped develop Romanticism and produced works that became a major influence and inspiration behind...

Longform

Mount Fuji is considered one of Japan's most iconic symbols and is a major draw for tourists. It's still a mountain, though, and potential hikers need to properly prepare for any climb.
What it takes to save lives on Mount Fuji