From the sugar rush of Tokyo's idol subculture to the discordant polyrhythms of its experimental punk and indie scenes, this book by Japan Times music columnist Ian F. Martin offers a witty and tender look at the wide spectrum of issues that shape Japanese music today. With unique theories about the evolution of J-pop as well as its history, infrastructure and (sub)cultures, Martin deconstructs an industry that operates very differently from counterparts overseas. Based partly on interviews with influential artists, label owners and event organisers, Martin's book combines personal anecdotes with cultural criticism and music history. An accessible and humorous account emerges of why some creative acts manage to overcome institutional pressures, without quitting their bands. Ian Martin's writing about Japanese music has appeared in The Japan Times, CNN Travel and The Guardian among other places. Martin is based in Tokyo, where he also runs Call And Response Records.

WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations. Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo. Kazu's life in the city began and ended in that park; he arrived there to work as a laborer in the preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and ended his days living in the vast homeless village in the park, traumatized by the destruction of the 2011 tsunami and shattered by the announcement of the 2020 Olympics. Through Kazu's eyes, we see daily life in Tokyo buzz around him and learn the intimate details of his personal story, how loss and society's inequalities and constrictions spiraled towards this ghostly fate, with moments of beauty and grace just out of reach. A powerful masterwork from one of Japan's most brilliant outsider writers, Tokyo Ueno Station is a book for our times and a look into a marginalized existence in a shiny global megapolis.

Citizens of Tokyo is the first collection in English of plays by one of Japan's most important contemporary playwrights, Oriza Hirata, whose works have been performed all over the world. The first part of Citizens of Tokyo, "At Home and Abroad," presents two plays--Toyko Notes and Kings of the Road--that are exemplary of Hirata's unique neorealist dramaturgy, which created one of the most important trends in Japanese theater since the 1990s: Quiet Theatre. The second part of the book presents two short comedies that satirize the politics of decision-making in Japan and abroad: "Loyal Rōnin: The Working Girls' Version" and "The Yalta Conference." The final part, "Robots and Androids are People Too," presents two short plays created in collaboration with Ishiguro Hiroshi and the Osaka University Robot Theatre Project. The plays are accompanied by a context-setting introduction from editor and cotranslator M. Cody Poulton.

State Department Publication 11183. Released October 2004. Lists treaties and other international agreements of the United States on record in the Department of State on January 1, 2004 which had not expired by their terms or which had not been denounced by the parties, replaced or superseded by other agreements, or otherwise definitely terminated. Published annually. Item 900-A.