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Cans of 7-Up discontinued in Japan, production quietly stopped last January

7-Up, Japan hardly knew ye.

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Do Japanese people like Dr. Pepper? Online poll seeks the truth, gets 28,000 responses

The results are surprising..but make sense if you think about it.

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SMAP, one of Japan’s most famous pop boy band groups, have announced they will disband at the end of this year.

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Does the new Lemongina taste like medicine and dirt? Mr. Sato investigates

Not since New Coke has a soft drink lowered the bar of expectations quite like Lemongina and its great taste of topsoil.

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Babymetal’s new album, Metal Resistance, is out now and it’s awesome

Not that you needed anyone to tell you, but…

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Six of our favorite songs performed on traditional Japanese instruments to get you to the weekend

From “Shake it off” to “Smooth Criminal”, these Japanese cover songs will definitely have you tapping your toes! 

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Knocking on your door: Kiyoshi Sugo’s beautiful, melodic dubstep【J-Tunes】

May is almost over and summer is about to kick into high-gear. Business people are slipping into their “cool-biz” outfits, and the air conditioners on the trains are coming on full blast now. Pretty soon you’ll be able to find us all at the beach fanning ourselves while slurping down the finest kakigori money can buy. And what better way is there to go into summer than with some sick new tunes?

That’s right, we’re back with more J-Tunes for you! And today we have one of Japan’s best electronic music producers, Kiyoshi Sugo. If you like dancing, lush melodies, fat basslines, or sick drops, you need to check this out.

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Pleated skirts, Kewpie dolls, and death: The wild music and videos of Urbangarde【J-Tunes】

It’s been a good few months for weird music videos, hasn’t it? With BABYMETAL, Avril Lavigne, and Die Antwoord all confusing us in good and/or bad ways (seriously, Avril?), it might seem like there’s no room for crazy music left in your head. But you’d be wrong, because today we have for you the most recent offering of the electro-pop-rock band Urbangarde. And the video isn’t just visually striking–the music is guaranteed to get stuck in your head for the next couple of days! It’s a problem we haven’t figured out to solve yet.

Though, we have to admit that we’re not trying very hard.

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It wasn’t so long ago that everywhere you looked in Japan there were ads for Korean pop groups, cosmetics and health drinks. More people than ever were snapping up Korean language textbooks and, despite territorial squabbles and a few extreme-right noise makers, Japan was positively leaping on anything prefixed by the letter ‘K’.

Recent reports, however, suggest that all is not well in the K-Pop (Korean Pop music) camp in Japan, with major Korean record label and talent agency S.M. Entertainment reporting losses of more than 70 percent compared to the same period last year. Has the K-Pop bubble finally burst in Japan?

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