Rokusuke Ei, who wrote the lyrics to the global hit "Sukiyaki" ("Ue o Muite Aruko"), passed away from pneumonia at his home on Thursday. He was 83. Born in Tokyo in 1933 and a graduate of Waseda ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. In June 1963, a Japanese pop song soared to the top of America’s Billboard Hot 100 chart. More than 50 years later, ...

Memories of a prison camp in the Arizona desert, a tsunami and a plane crash are stirred by the bittersweet Japanese song Sukiyaki, a huge global hit of the 1960s. Originally released in Japan with ...

The Hot 100 launched in 1958, just 13 years after the end of World War II. The war was still well within living memory, and I have to imagine that it left deep psychic wounds all across the globe. And ...