Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking.
Help! is the fifth studio album by the English rock band the Beatles and the soundtrack to their film of the same name. It was released on 6 August 1965. Seven of the fourteen songs, including the singles "Help!" and "Ticket to Ride", appeared in the film and take up the first side of the vinyl album. The second side includes "Yesterday", the most-covered song ever written. The album was met with favourable critical reviews and topped the Australian, German, UK and US charts.
The Tokyo Tower is a communications and observation tower in the Shiba-koen district of Minato, Tokyo, Japan, built in 1958. At 332.9 meters (1,092 ft), it is the second-tallest structure in Japan. The structure is an Eiffel Tower-inspired lattice tower that is painted white and international orange to comply with air safety regulations.
Ken Watanabe is a Japanese actor. To English-speaking audiences, he is known for playing tragic hero characters, such as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi in Letters from Iwo Jima and Lord Katsumoto Moritsugu in The Last Samurai, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Among other awards, he has won the Japan Academy Film Prize for Best Actor twice, in 2007 for Memories of Tomorrow and in 2010 for Shizumanu Taiyō. He is also known for his roles in Christopher Nolan's films Batman Begins and Inception, as well as Memoirs of a Geisha, and Pokémon Detective Pikachu.
Showdown in Little Tokyo is a 1991 American buddy cop action film directed by Mark L. Lester, who also produced with Martin E. Caan. The film stars Dolph Lundgren and Brandon Lee; it was the latter's first American film role. The film was released in the United States on August 23, 1991. Showdown in Little Tokyo was Dolph Lundgren's last Warner Bros Pictures film until 2018's Creed II.
Takeshi Kaikō was a prominent post-World War II Japanese novelist, short-story writer, essayist, literary critic, and television documentary writer. He was distinguished by his knowledge, intellect, sense of humor and conversational skills, and although his style has been criticized as wordy and obtuse, he was one of the more popular Japanese writers in the late Shōwa period.
Norwegian Wood is a 1987 novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The novel is a nostalgic story of loss and burgeoning sexuality. It is told from the first-person perspective of Toru Watanabe, who looks back on his days as a college student living in Tokyo. Through Watanabe's reminiscences, readers see him develop relationships with two very different women—the beautiful yet emotionally troubled Naoko, and the outgoing, lively Midori.
The Yakuza is a 1974 neo-noir crime drama film directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Mitchum, Ken Takakura and Brian Keith. The screenplay by Paul Schrader and Robert Towne is from a story by Schrader's brother, Leonard Schrader.
Frederick James Lloyd was an English artist. He became famous for his paintings, mostly of animals and country landscapes.
Kenichi Hagiwara was a Japanese singer and actor.
Kaho Minami is a Japanese actress of Korean descent active in film, television and commercials.
Yōichi Sai was a Japanese film director. He was the president of the Directors Guild of Japan.
Kiyokata Kaburaki was the art-name of a Nihonga artist and the leading master of the bijin-ga genre in the Taishō and Shōwa eras. His legal name was Kaburaki Ken'ichi. The artist himself used the reading "Kaburaki", but many Western sources transliterate it as "Kaburagi".
The Casbah Coffee Club, officially Casbah Club, was a rock and roll music venue in the West Derby area of Liverpool, England, that operated from 1959 to 1962. Started by Mona Best, mother of early Beatles drummer, Pete Best, in the cellar of the family home, the Casbah was planned as a members-only club for her sons Pete and Rory and their friends, to meet and listen to the popular music of the day. Mona came up with the idea of the club after watching a TV report about The 2i's Coffee Bar in London's Soho where several singers had been discovered.
Tatsuya Nakamura is a Japanese musician, drummer and actor. After performing with several prominent punk rock bands, Nakamura rose to fame as drummer of Blankey Jet City from 1987 to 2000. In 1996, he founded his solo project Losalios, where he performs every instrument. He is also a member of Friction, Mannish Boys with Kazuyoshi Saito, and Gokumontō Ikka.
Ken Uehara was a Japanese film actor. He appeared in more than 200 films between 1935 and 1990. He starred in Entotsu no mieru basho, which was entered in the 3rd Berlin International Film Festival. His son is the singer and actor Yūzō Kayama.
Ningen Isu is a Japanese heavy metal band from Hirosaki, formed in 1987 by Shinji Wajima and Ken-ichi Suzuki. They took their name from the 1924 short story of the same name by Edogawa Rampo.
Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan is a 2009 memoir by Jake Adelstein of his years living in Tokyo as the first non-Japanese reporter working for one of Japan's largest newspapers, Yomiuri Shinbun. It was published by Random House and Pantheon Books. HBO adapted the memoir into a 2022 television series. The veracity of the tales described in the memoir has been called into question.
The English rock group the Beatles toured West Germany, Japan and the Philippines between 24 June and 4 July 1966. The thirteen concerts comprised the first stage of a world tour that ended with the band's final tour of the United States, in August 1966. The shows in West Germany represented a return to the country where the Beatles had developed as a group before achieving fame in 1963. The return flight from the Philippines to England included a stopover in Delhi, India. There, the Beatles indulged in two days of sightseeing and shopping for musical instruments while still under the attention of the press and local fans.
Images of a Woman, also known as The Tokyo Painting, is an abstract painting by the 1960s pop group the Beatles. It is believed to be the only painting produced collaboratively by the group.
