Two questions are typically asked surrounding Fujirock: “Are you going?” and “How was it?” Recently the answer to the first has been yes, while the answer to the second generally begins with “Wet” and gets more complicated from there. Despite the weather perpetually being an issue during the three-day megafest in the mountains of Yuzawa, a little known town in rural Niigata, the mainstay of the now 13 year-old music festival is almost always the sideshows. So a fan would be excused if they were lured to the expensive midsummer …

“It now appears that books in the form so beloved by Uncle Alex and me, hinged in unlocked boxes, packed with leaves speckled by ink, are obsolescent. My grandchildren are already doing much of their reading from words projected on the face of a video screen. Please, please, please wait just a minute.
At the time of their invention books were devices as crassly practical for storing or transmitting language, albeit fabricated from scarcely modified substances found in forest and field and animals as the latest Silicon Valley miracles. But by …

HESO contributor Deborah Shamoon looks at the past of gender roles in Japan to see the future of women

HESO heads to the mountains of Niigata for Fujirock to see My Bloody Valentine, Tricky, Grandmaster Flash, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Special Others & more

On paper they read like a relatively run-of-the-mill, up and coming alternative rock band: two guitars, bass, drums, female vocalist all playing their hearts out for an eclectic independent label from backwoods, USA. Yet Deerhoof is not your typical San Francisco band. Nor is KRS (Kill Rock Stars) your typical label. Though somehow the two are a perfect fit, Deerhoof ranking as the all-woman-run, Olympia-based label’s oldest and best-selling act. Originating as a drums and guitar duo in the mid-90s, it has taken over ten years, ten albums and ten …

Cornelius is not a man. Nor, for that matter, is he an ape (though the name comes from Planet of the Apes). Cornelius is a musical group founded by Oyamada Keigo (小山田圭吾) in the early 90s after his Shibuya-kei duo with Ozawa Kenji, Flipper’s Guitar, split up. Suddenly a solo act, Oyamada spent the next five or so years crafting his persona and honing his production skills, a sabbatical ultimately culminating in what made it all worth the wait—the music.
1997 saw Cornelius break into various European and American indie scenes …

Japan is most widely known for islands of the geological sort, but unfortunately the country is also the world’s premier spot for a completely different sort of island: Urban Heat Islands. Even if you’ve never heard of an Urban Heat Island, chances are you live on one if you reside in Japan. Technically known as the “Urban Heat Island effect,” the term describes how temperatures in inner city cores are abnormally higher than temperatures in surrounding, less densely developed areas. The underlying mechanisms behind Heat Island formation are rather complex, …

Tattoos leave an impact, both literally and figurative. People are as drawn to them as they are repelled by them. In this dichotomy, the world of tattoos has either been pulled behind a veil, as in the case of Japan, or it has taken its own shirt off for all to see. Whether you have one (or several) or none, there is no denying that tattoos capture the imaginations of those who admire them, those who are disturbed by them, and those who wear them. By scratching the surface of …

The title of this article is stolen from a concurrently running Exhibition of ancient Japanese masterpieces depicting the Land of the Rising Sun in an infallible way and, what’s more, via these centuries old scrolls, kimono & woodblocks, implies that Japan is still this same country of beauty. Long having rested on their laurels stemming from remnants of a once-great culture, the time is ripe for a true exposition of what works of art this country truly offers. Don’t get me wrong: I like Japan. Mostly. Like Nipponphile Tarantino’s Pulp …

Japan has, at least since the 1980’s, been associated with the future. Ridley Scott based the set of his sci-fi classic Blade Runner partly on Osaka. Likewise, William Gibson’s Neuromancer (and a number of his other novels), the book that popularized the term cyberspace along with the cyberpunk genre, was set in partly in Tokyo. Both artists appreciated the hyper-consumerist, apocalyptic atmosphere saturating those cities. The overflow of concrete facades fixed with neon lights screaming shop names at potential customers crowding the streets: millions of ants swarming a discarded six-pack …

After nuking Japan, the Americans, in order to protect Japanese society from the dangers of marijuana, passed the Hemp Control Act in 1948. A few years later Japan experienced the first methamphetamine epidemic in the world. During the 1950s, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, approximately 30,000 people each year were arrested in connection with speed. Things have calmed down since then. But speed is still the number one illicit drug of choice in Japan, and its use is once again rising among young people.
There are …