On Sept. 23, 35,000 people flocked to the Tsumagoi resort area in Shizuoka Prefecture to attend a concert featuring folk-rock singer Takuro Yoshida and the soft rock trio Kagu-yahime. In 1975 these two artists played for 12 hours at the same site in front of 50,000 fans at the first-ever concert of its kind or size in Japan. They performed about 100 songs.
The bulk of the 2006 crowd was made up of men in their 40s and 50s who sang along lustily with every song. Most of the concert was broadcast live on NHK's Hi-Vision satellite channel. This week, NHK's "Premium 10" (NHK-G, Monday, 10 p.m.) will present a documentary on the concert and Takuro's career, which started in 1970. This year he turned 60, and in many ways the restaging of the legendary Tsumagoi concert was a comeback, since Takuro spent the last three years successfully battling lung cancer. The fact that he could perform for eight hours last month would seem to prove that he's fully recovered.
Many of the world's great museums often began with storerooms of the booty of kings. St. Petersburg's Hermitage Museum started out in a slightly different way. In 1764, Catherine the Great purchased a large collection of Western European paintings and installed them in the Hermitage, which was built as a palace.