Philip Brasor - The Japan Times

CULTURE / Music

Apr 17, 2005

Agenuine late bloomer, Cristina Branco reportedly had never listened to fado, the most famous popular music form of her native Portugal, until she was 18 and her grandfather loaned her a record by Amalia Rodrigues, Portugal's greatest singer. Like most Portuguese who grew up in middle-class comfort following...

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Apr 17, 2005

Prime Minister Koizumi smiles in the face of the people's apathy

No matter how alarming the day's news is, you can always count on Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to put a happy face on it. In the daily press conferences where he sidles up to journalists to field a few softballs he always has a way of making everything sound inconsequential.

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Apr 10, 2005

Corporate deregulation: Fear, loathing, firms losing the plot

Ever since the Japanese government started deregulating the economy in the '90s, there has been talk of an emerging income gap (kakusa). To a country that likes to think of itself as being uniformly middle class, social stratification means trouble, since it is often related to increasing crime, alienation,...

CULTURE / Music

Apr 10, 2005

Hood creeping out of the shadows

Almost 15 years after deciding to make music under the mysterious sounding moniker Hood, brothers Chris and Richard Adams have released the widely appreciated "Outside Closer," their ninth album overall and fourth for Domino, perhaps the hippest U.K. label at the moment. Given the fickleness of the music...

CULTURE / Music

Apr 10, 2005

Keren Ann: "Nolita"

Last summer, Keren Ann Zeidel, who was born in Israel and raised in Paris, built on the cosmopolitan rep she's developed over several French-language albums of quiet singer-songwriter pop with the all-English "Not Going Anywhere," her first CD to be released outside of France.

CULTURE / Music

Apr 3, 2005

Brazilian Girls: "Brazilian Girls"

Is there a genre name as pointlessly generic as World Beat? This common gripe, in fact, is the conceptual brainstorm behind the heady appeal of Brazilian Girls, a quartet of New York-based club musicians none of whom are Brazilian and only one of whom is a girl. Though they dabble in bossa nova, they...

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Apr 3, 2005

So much food that we don't know what to do with it

The media didn't quite know what to make of that bizarre story last month about the elderly Sapporo man who allegedly killed his wife following a dinnertime spat. One might expect a husband to become angry over not getting enough food, TV commentators implied, but in this case the situation was the opposite....

CULTURE / Music

Mar 27, 2005

Erykah Badu

When Erica Wright changed her name to Erykah Badu, donned exotic headgear, and staked her place among the crowd of new female soul singers in the late '90s, her voice was compared favorably to Billie Holiday's; and while the compliment helped her gain some critical distinction, it was about as helpful...

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Mar 27, 2005

Ten years of tero in Japan: Notes on usage

Japanese language purists carp about the surfeit of katakana, but as with all cultural manifestations, from bossa nova to breakfast cereals, the Japanese manage to make these linguistic borrowings their own in an unmistakable way, the most obvious being abbreviation.

JAPAN / Media

Mar 23, 2005

Duty calls

Special to The Japan Times In the United States, it's said that the Vietnam War was lost on TV. As the first armed conflict to receive graphic coverage on nightly news shows, the war seemed closer than it was. Consequently, questions surrounding its legitimacy eventually came to the fore and, for many...

CULTURE / Music

Mar 20, 2005

Scott Herren

Many major American hip-hop artists profess admiration and even envy for the experimental glitch mastery of the European electronica artists who make up the roster of Warp records. If there's a missing link between the two sensibilities it's probably Atlanta native Scott Herren, who records for Warp...

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Mar 20, 2005

Training men in sex education is the key to unlock women-only cars

On the same day that now former Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker Kazuyoshi Nakanishi was arrested for indecent assault in Roppongi there was a similarly themed news story buried in the back of the dailies that put his misdemeanor in perspective. Officials of JR East Japan announced that they are planning...

CULTURE / Music

Mar 13, 2005

Sibling rivalry fans the creative flames

Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger, the brother-sister duo known as Fiery Furnaces, have become the standard bearers of underground progressive rock by reviving the idea that albums can be complete, integrated pop works unto themselves. In this age of institutionalized short attention spans and the iPod...

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Mar 13, 2005

Fuji TV in a Horie to distance itself from IT man

Next month, Fuji TV will launch another batch of up-to-the-minute trendy drama series. Among them is one called "Koi ni Ochitara/Boku no Seiko no Himitsu (Falling in Love/The Secret of My Success)" starring SMAP member Tsuyoshi Kusanagi as a young man who, after his small family-run factory goes bankrupt,...

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Mar 6, 2005

People are so funny about their paper money

Every so often there's a big news story about someone finding a huge amount of money in the unlikeliest of places. The most recent one had to do with tens of millions of yen in cash discovered in a stream in Hasuda, Saitama Prefecture.

CULTURE / Music

Feb 27, 2005

Dalek

One rarely hears the term "underground rock" used any more, since the breakdown of the traditional indie/major dichotomy has rendered any stylistic notions attached to the term pointless. However, the term underground hip-hop is still very much in use, probably because mainstream hip-hop is such a slave...

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Feb 27, 2005

Lay judges could put many fears of the legal system to rest

In a survey carried out by the Cabinet Office last December, 81 percent of respondents said they supported the death penalty, with 53 percent saying they believe serious crimes would increase without it. The Justice Ministry has repeatedly pointed to public support for capital punishment as a main reason...

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Feb 20, 2005

Ah-choo! Picked up an allergy to the hay-fever industry

Last week the pharmaceutical company Riken announced that it was developing a new desensitivity treatment for serious allergy sufferers. The treatment program would entail fifty or so injections over a three-year period, which is quite a reduction in time. I should know. I received biweekly or monthly...

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Feb 13, 2005

Little progress on Japanese gender equality

Last weekend the Cabinet Office released the results of its latest gender-roles survey, which it has been carrying out irregularly since 1979. About 3,500 adult men and women offered their opinions about who should be in charge of the home and who should do the breadwinning. The results were reported...

CULTURE / Music

Feb 13, 2005

Dan Hicks

He turned 63 last December, but even back in the 1960s and early '70s, Dan Hicks could have been mistaken for a middle-aged hipster, more interested in clever, sexy wordplay and jazzy harmonics than in rockin' or jammin', which is more unusual than it sounds. As the drummer for the short-lived psychedelic...

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