Despite the fact that SOIL & DESPIMP” SESSIONS “agitator” goes by the nickname Shacho – which translates to company president in Japanese – it doesnt seem quite right packing the band into the ultra-plain white walled conference room to be used for this interview. As the four out of six members present – trumpeter Tabu…

Shanghai may have impressed early writers, but there is little affection or warmth for the city in their observations. Charles Halcombe, a gifted journalist who worked for the North China Daily News in the late 1880s, wrote of “ﾉnot wishing to enter the gloomy precincts of the French Concession, with its unpretentious buildings of miscellaneous…

It is October 28, 1993, a date indelibly stamped on the memory of every football fan in Japan. At Al-Ahly Stadium in Doha, Qatar, the Japanese players are lying helpless and broken on the field. Just moments earlier, Iraq, Japan’s opponents in a match they had to win to be sure of qualifying for the…

It’s easy enough to forget that Mount Takao is technically part of Tokyo. The higher up you go, ascending into the trees and the distinctly fresher air, the more the tension of big city life becomes an afterthought. From certain vantage points you can distinguish Shinjuku or even Yokohama in the smoggy distance. Of course,…

With its haughty tailors on Saville Row and its inimitable street-garb boutiques in Covent Garden, Britain has been at the forefront of fashion design and innovation for decades. Its hardly surprising, then, that the number of keen-eyed fashion buyers representing Japanese department emporiums, back-street boutiques and high-street retailers flocking to the major biannual fashion shows…

Most five-year-old boys in Japan harbor an ambition of becoming a doctor, pop star or professional baseball player but relatively few are able to pursue such dreams throughout their school years and beyond. One individual who has managed to buck this trend is up-and-coming pianist Takashi Yamamoto, who started piano lessons at the age of…

With his lavish silk mandarin jackets and trademark long blond locks of hair, celebrated flower arranger Shogo Kariyazaki looks for all intents and purposes to be the embodiment of his own maxim, ﾔbeauty begets beautyﾕ. And yet this self-proclaimed badge of honor was fostered long before he made regular appearances on TV chat shows, giggling…

If there is one place in Japan that makes the most of its unfulfilled destinies, it has to be Matsue, a luminous city along the atmospheric but otherwise lugubrious Sanﾕin coast. Corroborating this view is its massive castle, Matsue-jo, and its graceful Historical Museum, built in 1903 as a villa to accommodate the Meiji emperor,…

The image I had conjured up of Miss Universe Japan was of an exquisite creature cocooned in an ornate Rococo setting complete with a Greco-Roman water fountain and dainty nibbling sweets from a silver platter. But the office of IBG Japan was on the fifth floor of a non-descript building in Omotesando. Construction of the…

Ice hockey, considered by most to be the purview of toothless Canadians, black-eyed Minnesotans and bloodied Russians has been popular in Japan for years and its popularity has been spreading both in Japan and throughout Asia. Asia League Ice Hockey was formed in 2003 when the Japan Ice Hockey League expanded to other Asian countries…