Author, Researcher and Lecturer with a Passion for History, Music and Japan
Although I grew up in a (mostly) pop music free home, the name Katja Ebstein was familiar to me. Born in 1945, she was a highly successful pop singer in 1970s-Germany, who reached the finals of Eurovision Song Contest three times (1970, 1971, and 1980). So her songs were hard…
And so, Yamaha and Kawai toiled up and down the mountain roads of Hakone, carrying their masterpiece on a pole. The reactions of the music teachers in Hamamatsu and Shizuoka had shaken Yamaha’s confidence only slightly. Surely, whatever the problem with the reed organ they had built, he would be…
In the subsiding summer heat of September 1887, two men continuously placed their steps on the stone pavement of the Tôkaidô East Coast Road to Tokyo. Between them, strung on a pole they carried over their shoulders, they bore what looked like an oblong box. They had walked 90 miles…