Akira Wada

A young executive hunts down his father’s killer in director Akira Kurosawa’s scathing The Bad Sleep Well. Continuing his legendary collaboration with actor Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa combines elements of Hamlet and American film noir to chilling effect in exposing the corrupt boardrooms of postwar corporate Japan.

An Imperial Japanese Army regiment surrenders to British forces in Burma at the close of World War II and finds harmony through song. A private, thought to be dead, disguises himself as a Buddhist monk and stumbles upon spiritual enlightenment. Magnificently shot in hushed black and white, Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp is an eloquent meditation on beauty coexisting with death and remains one of Japanese cinema’s most overwhelming antiwar statements, both tender and brutal in its grappling with Japan’s wartime legacy.

Challenge! is the 1969 debut album by Japanese psychedelic rock band Yuya Uchida & The Flowers. The Flowers would become Flower Travelling Band. This is from the first compact disc pressing released in 1991 by Columbia.

Takao Uematsu (Uematsu Takao; 16. April 1947 in der Präfektur Tokio) ist ein japanischer Fusion- und Jazzmusiker (Tenorsaxophon, auch Sopransaxophon und Bassklarinette). Uematsu, der Autodidakt ist, begann mit 13 Jahren, Klarinette zu spielen, bevor er ans Tenorsaxophon wechselte. Er spielte 1965 bei Akira Ishikawa, dann bei Kiyoshi Sugimoto und um 1970 bei Takeshi Inomata, mit dessen Band Sound Ltd. erste Aufnahmen entstanden.