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December 23, 2024
 

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Suzannah Tartan
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 25, 2009
Miyake score taps the exotic
Jun Miyake is a self-proclaimed lover of the exotic. Nowhere is this more evident than in his latest composition, the music for a revival of avant-garde playwright Shuji Terayama's 1977 play, "Chugoku no Fushigina Yakunin" ("The Miraculous Mandarin").
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Nov 18, 2008
Dancing babies get mom out of the house
In the last year, my son and I have seen concerts by Bob Dylan, Spoon, Alice Cooper, The Raconteurs, The Roots (twice) and Cheap Trick. He worships Ray Charles but is anxiously waiting for The Zutons and AC/DC to tour. His iPod spins a similarly eclectic mix. His younger sister is already showing a marked...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Feb 22, 2008
Takagi taps the color of sound
Is Masakatsu Takagi a musician that makes video art or a video artist that makes music?
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Feb 8, 2008
Watt's going on — a punk at 50
Mike Watt doesn't look like a punk. With his fondness for plaid shirts and bushy mustaches, he looks, actually, more like a regular working-class guy — a steel worker, or a sailor like his father.
Japan Times
MULTIMEDIA
Jan 22, 2008
Making day care fit real needs
Second of two parts
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Jan 22, 2008
Where corporate care gets it right
In a spacious sunlit room, an infant is dawdled by his smiling nurse. Two toddlers fidgeting quietly in their sleep are patted by their doting teacher. Shelves are lined with infant formula, puzzles and a picture library that includes "The Hungry Caterpillar."
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design
Dec 18, 2007
Taking time for younger children
Every morning I trundle my daughter onto my bicycle and up the hill to her public day-care center in central Tokyo before heading off to work.
CULTURE / Music
Apr 13, 2007
Ono "Yes, I'm a Witch"
In the John Lennon/Yoko Ono mythology, Lennon was the sincere melody maker lured into the avant garde by Ono, whose public reputation vacillated between wailing banshee and cerebral art bitch. Who would have figured Yoko Ono wrote pop songs too? Such are the surprises of Ono's new album of "remixes."...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Feb 23, 2007
A spiritual conversation
The foreign music press has a weakness for weird Japanese music.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 15, 2006
Bossa nova forever young
The music may be ageless, but bossa nova's founding generation are aging. Forthcoming tours to Japan this month and next by Joao Gilberto, who, along with Antonio Carlos Jobim, was credited with creating bossa nova in the late 1950s, and Sergio Mendes, bossa nova's great popularizer, may well be their...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
May 26, 2006
Politics scaled with music
Matthew Herbert's new album "Scale" is easy to like. His signature arrangements of accessible house-inflected beats behind jazzy melodies are polished to a glossy sheen. Strings swoon. Horns sound lushly. Songs like the soulful "Moving like a Train" or "When We Are in Love" positively slink out of the...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
May 19, 2006
It's all music for Warp label
Warp, home to sonic pioneers such as Aphex Twin, and Boards of Canada is arguably the most influential electronica label in the world. But don't tell Warp founder Steve Beckett. For Beckett, who began the label with now deceased partner Rob Mitchell in a Sheffield record store in 1989, genre, and in...
CULTURE / Music
May 12, 2006
Juana Molina "Son"
Magical realism usually describes the writings of the great old men of Latin American literature, who have a knack for revealing the enchanted in the every day. Argentine musician and former television star Juana Molina shares the continent's mystical bent, and her fourth album, "Son," could be categorized...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Apr 21, 2006
Keeping rock simple
Jad Fair is the most unlikely of rock heroes. In his 40s, yet with the tall and gangly body of an adolescent and the naive blue eyes of a child, he looks like a preternaturally wide-eyed manga character.
CULTURE / Music
Dec 9, 2005
The Pixies
Bono, Bowie, Kurt Cobain and Thom Yorke have all said that The Pixies are one of the most influential bands of the past two decades. But minutes before taking the stage for another sold-out show during the current Pixies reunion tour of Japan, leader Frank Black isn't having any of it.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Nov 18, 2005
Best of friends kick up a storm in the fun house
Nothing frustrates a music critic more than a band that refuses categorization. Lots of bands, intoxicated with their own creativity, might make the claim. Not many, after a few records, resist a formula or a style that isn't easily pigeonholed in a pithy phrase or two.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 4, 2005
Once more, with feeling
With a mane of wild hair and the darkly circled eyes of the sleep deprived, one could easily mistake Kieran Hebden for a grad student up too late at the lab. There is little evidence in his striped polo shirt and khaki shorts that he is one of the more sought after electronica producers and performers....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jul 10, 2005
Contort yourself, by any means necessary
"No New York," the 1978 compilation produced by Brian Eno, remains a snapshot of lower Manhattan's music scene at that time. The pioneering punk club CBGB's was thriving, the influential performance space-cum-disco, the Mudd Club, was about to open and a musician could still afford to live in the East...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
May 29, 2005
Diva sings hot and cold on solo debut
It is 11 on a Sunday morning and Roisin Murphy has just arrived back at her London flat. Another big night out in the city's kinetic clubland?
CULTURE / Music
Mar 6, 2005
Red Krayola
Few musicians have tuned in and then twisted the musical zeitgeist as much as Mayo Thompson. Red Krayola, the main conduit for his music, is arguably rock's longest running underground band. Founded in Texas in 1966 as a psychedelic group, Red Krayola made the most outlandish freaked-out sounds of the...
How Bashar Assad's inner circle fled Syria after his fall
Syrians step on posters of Bashar Assad and his father, Hafez Assad, in Homs, Syria, on Tuesday.
Zelenskyy to replace Ukraine ambassador to Japan
Ukrainian Ambassador to Japan Sergiy Korsunsky delivers a speech during a handover ceremony of Self-Defense Force vehicles to Ukraine, at the Defense Ministry in Tokyo, in May last year.
Bankruptcies and suicides rise as Japanese struggle with mounting debt
Lawyers estimate that personal bankruptcies in Japan are on track to reach the highest since 2012 this year.
Honda and Nissan consider mutual production of vehicles, report says
Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe at the Japan Mobility Show 2023 at Tokyo Big Sight in October 2023.
The mighty Mekong River's growing plastic problem
A group of elephant keepers in Chiang Saen, Thailand, remove plastic waste from the Ruak River, a tributary of the Mekong River, as a pair of Asian elephants bathe behind them.
For baseball fans, 2024 brought The Summer of Shohei Ohtani
Dodgers designated hitter Shohei Ohtani reacts to a standing ovation from fans after hitting his 50th home run of the season, against the Marlins in Miami on Sept. 19.
Casual workouts, cool living, ‘complete’ food: Japan’s health trends of 2024
In 2024, efficiency trumped effort among Japan's fitness-focused aspirants.
Is Japan finally ready to tap its abundant geothermal energy potential?
Steam rises from a geothermal plan in Yuzawa, Akita Prefecture. Despite its long history and potential, geothermal provided just 0.3% of Japan's overall energy mix in the fiscal year from April 2023
Japanese officials inspect Yokota Air Base over PFAS concerns
The Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo in September 2019. An inspection of the base by Japanese government officials on Friday came amid public pressure to investigate suspected links between the use of PFAS-containing firefighting foam by the U.S. base and contamination of soil and groundwater in western Tokyo.
North Korea aiding Russia where it needs it most, Canadian general says
North Korean special forces soldiers march and shout slogans during a military parade marking the 105th birth anniversary of the country's founding father, Kim Il Sung, in Pyongyang in April 2017.

Podcast

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.
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Longform

Visitors to Kyoto walk along a street near Kiyomizu Temple in April. A popular tourist spot, Kyoto has seen what locals feel to be an overwhelming amount of tourists in 2024.
Is Japan ready for 60 million tourists?
By Kathryn Wortley

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