Philip Brasor - The Japan Times

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Feb 6, 2005

Kabuki kid's taxi tussle exposes insular world

Celebrities live in goldfish bowls, but some goldfish bowls are roomier than others. The amount of leeway the public is willing to allow a famous person in terms of objectionable behavior depends on the nature of that person's fame and his or her own understanding of the seriousness of the trespass....

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Jan 30, 2005

Japanese hero pointedly ignored

It's said that the virtue most valued in Japan is loyalty, which is why the famous heroes of Japanese literature and history are people who made sacrifices for their lords rather than their beliefs. And often, as in the case of the 47 ronin celebrated in Chushingura or the tokkotai (kamikaze) pilots...

CULTURE / Music

Jan 30, 2005

Mercury Rev: "The Secret Migration"

Along with their occasional partners in crime, The Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev made orchestral pop safe for college radio in the '90s. Both bands started out as psychedelicatessens, and like the Lips' Wayne Coyne, MR's Jonathan Donahue possesses a limited vocal instrument that makes it necessary for him...

CULTURE / Music

Jan 23, 2005

The Delgados

Everybody knows that Glasgow is the current Mecca of international indie rock, though there's some debate as to who is its Mohammed. People with long memories will claim it's The Pastels, who first explored the lo-fi, do-it-yourself aesthetic that the city has become famous for way back in the early...

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Jan 23, 2005

LDP big guns fight NHK censorship claims

Last Monday, a meeting organized by the Violence Against Women in War Network Japan to discuss its ongoing lawsuit against NHK was moved at the last minute from a tiny room in the Bunkyo Kumin Center to a large hall at the YMCA. The change was made to accommodate the many reporters who were suddenly...

CULTURE / Music

Jan 16, 2005

Brian Wilson

Ironic, isn't it, that Brian Wilson, the one with the famously debilitating anxiety problems, has outlived his two supposedly more well-adjusted brothers. Commercially, it means that The Beach Boys name is the property of cousin Mike Love, who for the past 20 years has successfully turned it into a touring...

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Jan 16, 2005

Single thirtysomethings under the spotlight

Last weekend, Nihon TV broadcast a two-hour program based on Junko Sakai's bestselling book "Makeinu no Toboe (The Howl of the Loser Dog)," a piece of nonfiction. The show, however, was a standard trendy drama, meaning long on ritzy real-estate and product placements, short on situations that resemble...

CULTURE / Music

Jan 12, 2005

Balancing act

Singer-songwriters are the half-breeds of pop music. Evolved from Bob Dylan's navel-gazing spawn, they lead hyphenated existences because each half of their calling is considered insupportable without the other. Though many are accomplished vocalists, what distinguishes them as singers doesn't always...

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Jan 9, 2005

Highlights and lowlights of a year in the media

Media Person of the Year: Bae Yong Joon

CULTURE / Music

Dec 26, 2004

Archer Prewitt: "Wilderness"

The fourth solo release by graphic artist and Sea and Cake guitarist Archer Prewitt is a passionate ode to romantic melancholy. In the spirit of Jimmy Webb, Prewitt lends mystical qualities to songs that can hold their own on Top 40 radio, highlighting his lush, high tenor rather than his guitar this...

CULTURE / Music

Dec 22, 2004

Bang a gong for . . .

The '60s Live! Award: Tie between Art Garfunkel and David Crosby, both of whom were busted for marijuana possession.

CULTURE / Music

Dec 22, 2004

Camping out

Camp was cool this year. Freddie Mercury was the most revered dead-pop-star role model, and many up-and-coming rock acts indulged in what Susan Sontag once called "the love of the exaggerated," whether it was Franz Ferdinand's metrosexual take on new wave or the Scissor Sisters' Studio 54 appropriation...

CULTURE / Music

Dec 19, 2004

Gang of Four

The news that Gang of Four is reuniting has been acknowledged happily by folks who grew up with the lads from Leeds back in 1979. Younger folks who love the band but want them to remain in the history books seem less pleased. Fans of The Futureheads, one of the many new British bands that shamelessly...

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Dec 19, 2004

Final warning: The horror of horrors medical TV show

The medical industry has become as scary as the diseases it treats. On Dec. 10, the government released a list of 7,000 medical institutions nationwide that handled tainted blood products before 1994, and on the same day a judge ordered the Tokyo Medical University Hospital to preserve evidence related...

CULTURE / Music

Dec 12, 2004

The Donnas: "Gold Medal"

Ditching their Ramones-like pseudonyms on their sixth album, The Donnas move beyond whatever novelty appeal they've retained since their high-school days in Palo Alto, Calif. Though they were never really a punk band, their artless energy endeared them to the kind of indiephiles who think innocence of...

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Dec 12, 2004

Lord Shrimp gets deep-fried over New Year's special

While surfing for coverage of the most recent NHK scandal on commercial television, I naturally had my radar tuned for expressions of schadenfreude, especially on the wide shows, where commentators enjoy a little more freedom to be critical. But there hasn't been much gloating. Last Monday, the host...

CULTURE / Music

Dec 5, 2004

Zap Mama

Originally an Afro-European vocal project based in Brussels, Zap Mama has over the past decade-and-a-half become the sole property of Zaire-to-Belgium transplant Marie Daulne, who formed the group with some "slightly eccentric" female friends in 1990. As those friends left, Daulne's sound became increasingly...

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Dec 5, 2004

Telephone fraud is criminally dumb at the end of the line

Misfortune for some can be entertaining to the rest of us. Microwaved poodles and death-by-sexual-dalliance often have such a ridiculous aura about them that we tend not to identify with the victims because the stupidity inferred precludes any feelings of sympathy.

CULTURE / Music

Dec 1, 2004

John and Joe: singin' bout their generations

In his famous 1976 essay, "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening," Tom Wolfe first put forth the now widely accepted idea that the counterculture of the 1960s had been perverted in the '70s by formerly progressive-minded baby boomers when they realized that genuine social change wasn't as important...

JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX

Nov 28, 2004

Light remains green for Filipinos in Japan -- well, kind of

The announcement of a basic free-trade agreement between Japan and the Philippines at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum in Santiago, Chile, was met with a positive response in the Japanese media. Japan, after all, clearly came out ahead: Tariffs on Japanese imported steel products will be substantially...

author

Meta

Twitter

Podcast

Longform

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTS

SUPPLEMENTS BINDER

In your social network

In your inbox

In your social network

In your inbox