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Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Feb 11, 2011

Miila and the Geeks take Tokyo 'riot grrrl' sound international

A small girl, stylishly dressed in a short, black-and-white dress crouches hunched over a microphone, spitting out vocals that might be English or might be Martian for all the audience can tell beneath the thick overlay of distortion; a sax player with crazy hair is engaged in some kind of intense, seemingly...
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / ON: FASHION
Feb 10, 2011

Blue moon rising over Tokyo

Comme des Garcons' Marunouchi: no longer alone
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / TECH_JAPAN
Feb 2, 2011

Handheld wars redux

For more than a decade, Nintendo ruled handheld gaming. Challengers, such as the Atari Lynx and the Sega Game Gear appeared, but Nintendo batted them away one by one. Only Sony and its PlayStation Portable could withstand the Nintendo onslaught. And Sony isn't going away anytime soon — launching a...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jan 28, 2011

Local, foreign songwriters camp it up

Early in the band's career, Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham is reputed to have locked Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in a room and told them not to come out until they'd written their first song.
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Dec 26, 2010

A clean slate for this year's media awards

Media persons of the year: Toshikazu Sugaya and Atsuko Muraki
LIFE / Food & Drink
Dec 24, 2010

Why not spend New Year's Eve totally soba?

The yearend period, called shiwasu, is a really hectic time in Japan. Think of it as spring cleaning, Thanksgiving and the usual end-of-year activities all rolled into one.
CULTURE / Film
Dec 10, 2010

'Film Socialisme'

Jean-Luc Godard once said in an interview in the magazine Cahiers du Cinema during the 1980s that 1960's "A Bout de Souffle (Breathless)" was his least favorite of his own films. The interviewer responded that he understood, and that the problem with Godard's first, most watched and most commercially...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WORDS TO LIVE BY
Dec 9, 2010

Hibiya Matsumotoro owner Tetsuro Kosaka

Tetsuro Kosaka, 78, is the owner of Hibiya Matsumotoro, one of Japan's most historical restaurants. A three-story building resembling a cozy country estate, Matsumotoro was designed to sit in the center of Japan's first Western-style park, Hibiya Koen, and it has been in business since the park opened...
JAPAN / Media
Nov 28, 2010

Nicholas Bornoff, Japan Times writer and author of 'Pink Samurai,' dies aged 61

Nicolas Bornoff, who died of cancer in London on Oct. 30, was my predecessor as a film critic at The Japan Times, starting in the late 1970s and continuing for nine years. His style, in contrast to fellow reviewer Andy Adams' slangy journalese, aimed for the elevated and authoritative, which made me,...
LIFE / Travel / BACKSTREET STORIES
Nov 28, 2010

Eats, shoots and leaves in Hakusan

It's hunting season in Tokyo. I kit up and trek out to the Hakusan area of Bunkyo Ward, hoping to shoot (with camera) the wild shades of autumn.
CULTURE / Music
Nov 26, 2010

The 'weird' world of techno's Ishino

"Salarymen are fantastic," says DJ and producer Takkyu Ishino. "If there weren't so many of them doing their thing, then people like me would not be able to exist. If more people acted like me (outside the norm), then I wouldn't have had the life that I've had."
COMMUNITY
Nov 13, 2010

Dream becomes reality for Scottish manga creator

It sits in a place of beauty, incongruously bordered between Japanese stone art and a vivid blue ink painting: "2000 A.D.," a classic British comic book from the 1980s. The apocalypse orange cover shrieks "Revenge of the Warlock" but — muted by a plastic overlay to protect its condition — the sci-fi...
CULTURE / Film
Nov 12, 2010

'Spring Fever'

Director Lou Ye continues to prove he's one of the more daring directors working in China today with his latest, "Spring Fever." Or perhaps I should say, one of the more daring directors not working in China today, for Lou was placed on the government censors' blacklist in 2006 after his last film, "Summer...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Nov 7, 2010

A Kyushu tale of two cities in one

Fukuoka, the biggest city in Kyushu and a key gateway linking Japan to the rest of Asia, has the air of a modern metropolis. But the city is also rich in traditional culture and its residents' long-standing hospitality toward visitors is well known.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Oct 31, 2010

Okinawan garden majesty

The world's first gardens may well have been made of coral, natural clusters of underwater beauty that could be glimpsed through the transparent water. Perfectly tone-coordinated, balanced and formed, they were refined by nature to a degree that may have suggested the divine.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Oct 29, 2010

Playing it for laughs the understated way

It is 3 p.m. in a quiet, residential neighborhood in Tokyo. A lady in a red dress stands by the side of a narrow street in front of a house, her hair held back and her face shielded from the sun by a woman holding a parasol.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 15, 2010

Breaking old conventions to find the new

Ryota Aoki (b.1978) says that he wants to see things that never before existed in ceramics. Personally, too, he is the exemplification of that ethos. We do not usually expect a celebrated ceramicist to be wearing a turban, have both ears pierced and be listening to hip-hop in the background as he sits...
LIFE / Digital / TECH_JAPAN
Oct 13, 2010

Takara Tomy's Love Digi continues evolution of purikura

Most readers in Japan will be familiar with the local phenomenon of purikura. Translated as "print club," they are small, user-decorated photographs with sticker backings. These personalized stickers are quite popular among young girls in Japan, who will often plaster them all over notebooks and mobile...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 1, 2010

Find time in the 'Forests of Asoka'

Like many people, I have an instinctive suspicion of conceptual art, regarding its practitioners in the same league as politicians, lawyers and snake oil salesmen; namely, hot-air artists who rely too much on words to win us over to their dubious concepts. Art should effortlessly speak for itself, but...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Sep 21, 2010

Battling a broken system

First in a two-part series In July, Tokyo's family court granted me, an American, physical custody (kangoken) of my 13-year-old daughter exactly 120 days after she was abducted by my Japanese wife, a lifelong public servant employed as a teacher at a state school in Tokyo. This just may be the first...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 17, 2010

Firth on playing it gay by playing it straight

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Colin Firth was nominated for an Oscar for best actor this year for "A Single Man." As we know, Hollywood insider Jeff Bridges took home the Oscar, but Firth was "genuinely thrilled at the nomination and genuinely relieved when it was over. The stress is something else. So are...
SOCCER / PREMIER REPORT
Sep 11, 2010

Rooney's antics overshadow England's strong start

LONDON — Another mad, mad week on Planet Football.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 3, 2010

'Trouble in Hollywood (What Just Happened?)'

Hollywood is such a duplicitous, back-stabbing, narcissistic pit of weasels and vipers that making a satire about it should be no more difficult than, say, getting a gram of cocaine delivered to a 90210 address at four in the morning. And yet the conundrum is this: If you really tell it like it is, you...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 27, 2010

Perceptions of space, from Japan to the world

"I'm a kind of iguana. But I'm the kind of iguana that travels."
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Aug 21, 2010

Voice of the times bridges cultures for seven decades

Most of us would probably be happy to have a handful of memories to reminisce over in our later years, episodes from our youth we could run past our friends while hoping their eyes don't glaze over. Ichiro Urushibara, a British citizen who has spent 69 years in Japan, has enough memories and amusing...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Aug 1, 2010

Lee Ufan: Korean at the forefront of Japan's modern art

For the last several years, Benesse Art Site on the island of Naoshima in the Seto Inland Sea has featured prominently in rankings of Japan's best tourist destinations.
Japan Times
LIFE
Jul 25, 2010

A northern odyssey

Komandorskiye Ostrova — the Commander Islands in English — are about as bleak and remote as anywhere imaginable for human habitation. Indeed, the two islands in the group, named Bering and Medny, support only one hardy community of fewer than 1,000 souls in a settlement called Nikolskoye on Bering...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 8, 2010

Japan's economic fantasy

HONG KONG — Belatedly, Japan's leading politicians are waking from their coma and realizing that the country's economy is in a massive mess hit by a triple whammy of low growth, heavy debts and an increasingly aging population.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHO'S WHO
Jun 29, 2010

French patissier's dream becomes reality in Japan

When Antoine Santos was growing up in the port of Marseille in southern France, he dreamed of becoming a pastry teacher by the age of 30. Little did he imagine his dream would come true — in Japan.

Longform

A man offers prayers at Hebikubo Shrine in Tokyo's Shinagawa Ward. The shrine is one of several across the country dedicated to the snake.
Shed your skin and reinvent yourself in the Year of the Snake