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Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Nov 27, 2015

Mercury Rev comes back from disaster to see the light

"Sometimes years go by, it seems," Jonathan Donahue sings within seconds of Mercury Rev's ninth album, "The Light in You," giving the first snapshot into the mental state of a band that has returned from the brink. Seven years, in fact, had passed since Mercury Rev last released a record, a period that...
Japan Times
MULTIMEDIA
Nov 27, 2015

November 28, 2015

Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Nov 25, 2015

Simon Curtis' 'Woman in Gold' an ode to heritage

'Woman in Gold" can perhaps be described as the sister film to "The Monuments Men" (2014). Both are fiction based on hard facts, and both involve the Nazi theft of major artworks during WWII. At their core is a deep love for art, and the conviction that art has an inherent power to trigger the noblest...
Japan Times
WORLD
Nov 20, 2015

Life after Schengen: What a Europe with borders would look like

Continental Europeans have gone so long — two decades — without internal border controls that the younger generation doesn't know what life is like with them. For a glimpse of the past, and the fortress mentality setting in after the Paris terrorist attacks, look no further than France's frontier...
Japan Times
WORLD
Nov 18, 2015

Activist hackers battle Islamic State in cyberspace

Islamic State sympathizers using social media to spread propaganda and recruit fighters are drawing an increasing amount of return fire from activists who have been knocking some sites offline and infiltrating others.
JAPAN
Nov 16, 2015

Japan's Islamic centers report no threats, feel Islam is misunderstood here

Friday's terrorist attacks in Paris and numerous others by the Islamic State group have forced Muslim communities around the world, including in Japan, to repeat a familiar phrase: Islam isn't the problem.
WORLD
Nov 16, 2015

U.S. carries out second delivery of ammunition to Syrian Arab fighters battling Islamic State

The United States has carried out a fresh delivery of ammunition to fighters from the Syrian Arab Coalition battling the Islamic State group in northern Syria, pushing ahead with a strategy that initially unnerved ally Turkey, a U.S. official said Sunday.
CULTURE / Music
Nov 15, 2015

Spangle call Lilli line returns with a new sound and a familiar vibe

'Ghost Is Dead," the 10th album from Tokyo's Spangle call Lilli line, shouldn't exist. Regular life caught up with the trio, leaving them with little time to contemplate creating new music: Lead singer Kana Otsubo had a baby and her bandmates saw their day jobs eat up more and more of their personal...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Entertainment news
Nov 10, 2015

Chinese buyer nabs Modigliani nude for $170 million — second-highest price ever paid at art auction

A Modigliani nude painting was sold to an unnamed Chinese buyer at Christie's on Monday for $170.4 million, the second-highest price ever for a work of art at auction, as deep-pocketed collectors continue to pay, and pay big, for some rare masterpieces up for sale in this year's autumn auctions season....
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health
Nov 10, 2015

SeaWorld will phase out San Diego orca show

SeaWorld said on Monday it plans to replace its signature "Shamu" killer whale shows in San Diego with displays focused on "conservation," after grappling with sagging attendance and years of criticism over treatment of the captive marine mammals.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Nov 9, 2015

China faces raft of obstacles as it tries to calculate correct greenhouse gas emissions figures

To get a sense of how hard it is to measure greenhouse gas emissions in China, it pays to visit the Deqingyuan poultry farm on the outskirts of Beijing, where streams of chicken manure are piped from wooden sheds to an industrial gas digester that rises above the ground like a tethered balloon.
Japan Times
TENNIS
Nov 9, 2015

Surging Djokovic beats Murray in Paris Masters final

Novak Djokovic's relentless desire for tennis perfection is pushing him to a consistently brilliant level, one which proved far too high for Andy Murray on Sunday.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Nov 7, 2015

Sewing the seeds of new craft ideas

'I never thought I'd be taking over my father's position. At first, I wasn't even interested in the tradition of the stitching," says Sadaharu Narita, president of crafts company Hirosaki Kogin Kenkyujo. "But now that I'm in that position, I feel grateful that I can seek out and produce new values...
JAPAN / Media / Japan Pulse
Nov 7, 2015

YouTubers in Japan with 100,000 fans and counting

YouTube threw a big celebration for more than 20 YouTubers living in Japan who have over 100,000 subscribers.
Japan Times
JAPAN / History
Nov 5, 2015

Holocaust art collector seeks to repatriate works to Poland

Writer Michiko Nomura was bursting with anger at what she saw during her first visit to Holocaust memorials in Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1989.
Japan Times
MORE SPORTS
Nov 5, 2015

Former athletics chief Diack placed under investigation

Lamine Diack, the former head of world athletics, has been placed under formal investigation in France on suspicion of corruption and money laundering following a complaint from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 2, 2015

Somalia facing a whole new type of pirate

Somalia's rich marine resources are being plundered by foreign fishing vessels, and the war-torn nation needs international help to fend them off.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Oct 31, 2015

Turntable Films compile folksy pop vignettes for sophomore album 'Small Town Talk'

Today's music industry demands a constant churn of new content from artists, whether that be songs or videos or something else that can connect with fans immediately. Yosuke Inoue is understandably taken aback when asked what he and his band, Turntable Films, got up to in the three years since they released...
WORLD
Oct 25, 2015

Judge dismisses Wikimedia lawsuit over NSA surveillance — report

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by Wikimedia and other groups challenging one of the U.S. National Security Agency's mass surveillance programs, the Baltimore Sun reported.
Japan Times
Places
Oct 23, 2015

Halloween events in Japan 2015

Halloween in Japan ... can it get any bigger or crazier. Thanks to a perfect storm of cosplay and consumerism, Japan's major cities have embraced the Western holiday in a big way over the past five years. And this list of Halloween events in Tokyo and elsewhere is just the tip of the big orange iceberg.
JAPAN / Media / Japan Pulse
Oct 22, 2015

Ginza Cozy Corner takes dessert into hyperdrive with 'Star Wars' cakes

One Japanese confectionary vendor is about to find the Force deep within a sweet tie-up.
JAPAN
Oct 20, 2015

Yamaguchi-gumi split, toughened laws will weaken gangs: experts

The recent fracturing of the Yamaguchi-gumi, the country's largest and most powerful crime syndicate, will considerably weaken the gang organization and all yakuza groups in general, two noted experts told a news conference Tuesday in Tokyo.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books / ESSENTIAL READING FOR JAPANOPHILES
Oct 17, 2015

'Little Songs of the Geisha' collected by an American anthropologist

The label kouta (which roughly translates as, "little song") has been applied to any number of popular Japanese music forms over the centuries. But these days, the word usually refers to a specific genre of shamisen music that evolved in 19th-century Edo (present-day Tokyo) from existing popular styles,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 13, 2015

'The Golden Pharaohs and Pyramids: The Treasures from the Egyptian Museum, Cairo'

Oct. 16-Jan. 3
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Oct 10, 2015

Lefkada's Hearn: Europe reclaims its literary 'lost son'

The Greek island of Lefkada, rising from the Ionian Sea south of Corfu, is famed for its white beaches and vertical cliffs from which the poet Sappho is said to have leaped to her death. The island is also claimed as the one of the potential sites of Homer's Ithaca, home of the great wandering hero Odysseus....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Oct 10, 2015

'Grassroots Fascism' throws the war experience of Japanese into sharp relief

Yoshimi Yoshiaki's "Grassroots Fascism" takes an analytical look into the brutality and extensive indoctrination that Fascist policy in Imperial Japan caused.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Oct 8, 2015

Guitarist Tomoyasu Hotei calls on his pals for 'Strangers'

Recalling his first encounter with rocker Iggy Pop, a huge grin flashes across the face of Tomoyasu Hotei. It occurred at Berlin airport around 30 years ago when he was recording in Germany with former band Boøwy. Despite being one of the most famous musicians in Japan, the guitarist was too shy to...

Longform

Visitors walk past Sou Fujimoto's Grand Ring, which has been recognized as the largest wooden structure in the world.
Can a World Expo still matter? Japan is about to find out.