Revisit: Tokyo Idols and Urban Life

Anne McElvoy and guests discuss the concentration, distribution and morality of wealth now and look back at An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published by the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith in 1776, which gives an early account of what ...  Show more

Freedom is one of the leading values of our society. But with freedom comes responsibility, which is a much more contested principle. Deciding where responsibility lies, and what it means to take it, is the job of the courts. It is also debated in Parliament and in the media. It ...  Show more

Tomoko Hojo is an artist working with the fluidity between sound, music and performance. Recently she has been working on the theme of what makes (women’s) silenced voices audible in history, with a special focus on Japanese women who developed relationships with western countrie ...  Show more

Tamaki Ueda, aka Banetoriko, is a Japanese noise music artist who was born in Nara, moved to Los Angeles, and finally established herself in Osaka. Her music, composed with a self-made metal instrument named Banetek, is inspired by yokai, the supernatural creatures from Japanese ...  Show more

When WOMB opened in 2000, Japan’s nightlife scene was still in its infancy with a strict ban on dancing after midnight that made it almost impossible to run a regular nightclub. But over the past two decades, the revolutionary club has transformed the way people in Tokyo party. T ...  Show more

Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan's Pop Era and its Discontents (Harvard University Press, 2017) by Hiromu Nagahara is the first English-language history of the origins and impact of the Japanese pop music industry. The book connects the rise of mass entertainment, epitomized by ryūkōka ...  Show more