Search - entertainment

 
 
CULTURE / Music / HOGAKU TODAY
Jan 6, 2001

Japanese music gets support from New Year's tradition

New Year's in Japan is a period when Japanese suddenly seem to "rediscover" their traditional music. Radio and television stations, which, except for NHK, practically ignore traditional music for most of the year, get into the seasonal spirit and air programs of the classical performing and theatrical...
JAPAN
Jan 5, 2001

Asahi, IHT to jointly publish daily

Major national newspaper Asahi Shimbun Co. will jointly publish an English-language newspaper in Japan with the International Herald Tribune, the Japanese daily said Thursday.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jan 1, 2001

Eye-openers for the new year

GREETINGS FROM EROS!: Hokusai and the Erotic Calendar-Print. Richard Lane, bilingual (Japanese/English) text. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo, 2000. Unpaginated, profusely illustrated -- color plates, b/w photos, 3,800 yen. Sending calendar prints as New Year salutations was one of the amenities of traditional...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Dec 31, 2000

Minoru Akimoto

"For a college kid in a provincial town in the early 50s, there were not many options for learning English. My teachers were Hollywood movies. I memorized a script and then sat in a movie theater all day, watching and listening to the same movie time and again."
BUSINESS
Dec 30, 2000

Haggling, fast turnover key to new fashion market

Young women browse through vogue clothes, leather jackets, accessories, wigs and colorful lingerie displayed at about 50 booths in Tondemun Sijan, a new fashion market in Tokyo's Shibuya Ward.
JAPAN
Dec 29, 2000

Police report Obara-Blackman link

Hair found in a condominium belonging to accused rapist Joji Obara may be that of missing Briton Lucie Blackman, a flight attendant-turned bar hostess who disappeared in July, police said Thursday.
JAPAN
Dec 26, 2000

Teen in shop-bombing faces charge of attempted murder

Police on Monday served a fresh arrest warrant on a 17-year-old boy from Tochigi Prefecture arrested earlier this month over an explosion caused by a homemade bomb at a video shop in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward, suspecting him of attempted murder.
JAPAN
Dec 24, 2000

Universal leads Kinki tourism boom

OSAKA -- With construction work on Universal Studio Japan nearing completion, expectations are running high that the Hollywood theme park will attract hordes of visitors and revitalize a hitherto drab industrial site.
JAPAN
Dec 18, 2000

Societal barriers facing disabled may prove the most formidable

As deputy chief of the Japanese delegation at the Sydney Paralympic Games this summer, Tsunenobu Wakana was impressed with the handicapped-friendly facilities and transportation system.
CULTURE / Music
Dec 17, 2000

A true match made in heaven

Wiener Philharmoniker Nov. 16, Seiji Ozawa conducting in Suntory Hall -- Symphony No. 3 in F Minor, Op. 90; Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73 (Johannes Brahms, 1833-97)
JAPAN
Dec 15, 2000

Obara pleads innocent to rape

The man police say may be connected to a high-profile hostess-abduction case pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges of drugging and raping two other foreign women.
JAPAN
Dec 7, 2000

Video shop bomber sent to prosecutors

Police turned over to public prosecutors Wednesday the case of a 17-year-old boy from Tochigi Prefecture who was arrested on charges of bombing a video shop in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward.
JAPAN
Dec 6, 2000

Video shop bomber 'wanted to destroy people'

The 17-year-old boy who was arrested Monday evening after claiming responsibility for an explosion at a video shop in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward has told police that he "wanted to destroy people" at random.
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Dec 4, 2000

Judging history's 'single most violent act'

At a midtown bar, Wolcott Wheeler, whom I call a historian without portfolio, tells me a story about Robert Oppenheimer: how the physicist, meeting President Harry Truman in the Oval Office, said, "Mr. President, I have blood on my hands."
CULTURE / Art
Dec 3, 2000

Art to help heal the soul

Artists Without Borders and its offspring, Kids Without Borders, are devoted to providing humanitarian relief to the victims of war and ethnic strife. As such, they share obvious connections with Doctors Without Borders.
COMMUNITY
Nov 30, 2000

1,000 yen shops offer customers discount-shopping thrills

In response to the continuing economic slump, 100 yen shops have popped up everywhere in the last few years, but their popularity may soon be overshadowed by the emergence of 1,000 yen shops.
LIFE / Travel / NATURE TRAVEL
Nov 29, 2000

Exploring deepest, darkest New Jersey

New York is New York, and Manhattan is, 24 hours a day, full throttle, unquestionably, Manhattan. What we wanted after two weeks of both was a place that was neither.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Nov 23, 2000

A night at the culinary opera

Let it be stated unequivocably and from the outset: The Food File is not a great fan of gastrodomes and flashy new mega-restaurants where style outweighs substance and quality is sacrificed at the altar of fleeting fashion. Nor are we enamored of restaurant chains, where menus -- no matter how titillatingly...
JAPAN
Nov 22, 2000

Public angered by Kato's flip-flop on no-confidence motion

People around the country expressed disappointment and anger Tuesday over the anticlimactic end to Koichi Kato's closely watched revolt against his Liberal Democratic Party colleague, Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori.
JAPAN
Nov 8, 2000

Shops continue discriminatory practices

A year has passed since the Shizuoka District Court issued a landmark ruling that awarded damages to a Brazilian journalist for being refused service at a jewelry shop in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, simply because she was foreign.
CULTURE / Music
Nov 4, 2000

Jazzchor Freiburg throws it all in the mix

African folk songs, rap, J.S. Bach, Jimmy Hendrix and tap-dancing might sound like an unlikely mix for a night of jazz. Through the collective lungs of Jazzchor Freiburg, however, anything's possible.
JAPAN
Oct 26, 2000

South Korea, Japan singers on same key

An association of Japanese singers and its South Korean counterpart have signed a friendship agreement in a deepening of cultural exchanges in the wake of Seoul's decision in June to further ease its ban on cultural imports from Japan.
LIFE / Travel
Oct 25, 2000

Bubbling with energy

If you can accept its gimmickry and brazen commercialism, the glitzy, neon-lit hot spring resort of Beppu, a melange of pachinko parlors, love hotels, sleazy bars, night clubs and hot baths visited by over 12 million tourists a year, constitutes an amazing thermal and entertainment roller-coaster.
LIFE / Digital
Oct 25, 2000

Xpect the unxpected

SEATTLE -- What does Microsoft know about fun? The engineers who designed Xbox, the new 128-bit video game console that Microsoft plans to release sometime next year, know too much for their own good.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Oct 22, 2000

All you ever wanted to know about voodoo

Gaston Jean-Baptiste, known as "Bonga," is a voodoo priest and a conga player. Bonga has been touring Japan giving workshops on Haitian music and teaching the traditions of Haiti. Luckily, one of the stops on his tour was my living room. A small, amiable man with dreadlocks, Bonga spoke from his "zabuton":...

Longform

Tetsuzo Shiraishi, speaking at The Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage, uses a thermos to explain how he experienced the U.S. firebombing of March 1945, when he was just 7 years old.
From ashes to high-rises: A survivor’s account of Tokyo’s postwar past