The 48-year-old Japanese Crown Prince Naruhito is visiting Los Angeles starting today for a 2-day trip in town which includes a visit to the Japanese American National Museum downtown tomorrow. No word yet if he'll check out the first American Japanese "Maid Cafe," Royal/T, in Culver City. Then again, anyone who goes there could get treated like royalty: "Welcome home, Master."......

Photo by Lush.i.ous via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr PARTY Pop shop Japan L.A. celebrates their 2 year anniversary at Rise at the Highlands. Come decked out in your best Lolita and Japanese street fashion and get your picture taken with Hello Kitty. 10 p.m. // Rise at The Highlands // 6801 Hollywood Blvd. Suite 433 Hollywood // (323) 461-9800 // Free ART For one night only, Billy Shire Fine Arts will......

Bettina Korek and her For Your Art crew did it again -- another fantastic art opening slammed with people. Actually, they have been sizzlin' hot all weekend with the first LA Art Weekend (with more events today), which has highlighted some of the city's newest gallery spaces including last night's opening of Royal/T, the nation's first Japanese "Maid Cafe," and the pop up Storefront for Architecture and Art on Friday. Royal/T is a shop, an......

Photo by Plankton 4:20 via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr More on the arrest of Kazuyoshi Miura, who is accused of killing his wife in LA in 1981 and is being extradited from Japan: Turns out it was his blogging that got the authorities' attention. Bad blogger! Bad! Another one from the Cold Case Files solved: 47-year-old Wayne Osbourne of Virginia has been charged in the 1988 murder of Diana Michael, who......

"orange chair with cushion," by kpe II via LAist Featured Photos Pool on Flickr A steady stream of Koreans moving into the northwest San Fernando Valley suburbs is giving the traditional K-Town in LA City a run for its money. Now you Valley-ists might not have to travel over the hill for karaoke bars. Japanese and Los Angeles police detectives solved a 26-year-old case of a Japanese business man who allegedly shot his wife......

Lakers 130, Suns 124 - So I'm like "OMG!" and then she's like "fer reelllllz!" And then I'm like "NO.WAY." and the she's like "totally." Whoops. That's the last time we let our teenage niece borrow the keyboard -- but she did sum things up pretty well. Jimmy will have all the deets on the NBA's greatest February game of all time at 9:00am. Clippers 100, Grizzlies 86 - The Clippers are officially LA's bastard......

Just in time for the release one of the most anticipated titles for the Wii this year, the folks over at Nintendo are staging a regional tournament for fans of Super Smash Brothers Brawl, the game that just recently shattered Wii sales records in Japan. According to our sources, the first 256 people who show up at the Orpheum theater downtown will have a chance to fight to the finish in an attempt to......

If you see folks walking around with some dirt on their foreheads today, they proabably did it on purpose. It is Ash Wednesday, where Christians are supposed to fast, pray, repent after the debauchery of Mardi Gras and (Super Tuesday). So here' are a few debauch-free events for tonight: WORDS The ALOUD series continues with John Burnham Schwartz, author of Reservation Road, who talks about his new novel set in 1959 Japan where a non-aristocratic......

When I lived in Japan, I often ate a communal stew called nabe in the wintertime. One of the staple ingredients within the myriad of possibilities of a nabe is konnyaku. Konnyaku is a firm translucent gelatin with black spots that is completely flavorless. After a few months, I felt comfortable enough to ask a close friend why Japanese people eat the flavorless konnyaku. The answer surprised me. It's the texture of the konnyaku......

WORDS SCI-Arc’s spring lecture series on design and architecture kicks off tonight with Jeffrey Kipnis, professor of architectural design and theory at Ohio State University. Kipnis will discuss “happy,” “zany” and other important political trends in architecture. So the title of his lecture -- *@$#*!#!! -- does make sense. Kind of. 7 pm // W. M. Keck Lecture Hall SCI-Arc, 960 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles // Free. MORE WORDS David Frum is a former......

As you might have guessed, we're pretty big into gaming over at my house -- our console set-up includes the both generations of the Xbox, not one but TWO PS2's (one for the living room, one for the bedroom), a Dell XPS with a wide-screen monitor (for PC gaming), a Nintendo Gamecube, a Nintendo 64, an SNES, and a Gameboy -- oh, and possibly a Sony PSP floating around somewhere. Our 50" big-screen is optimized......

It was almost a year ago that LAist was blown away by the US Sumo Open at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. The day of amateur sumo wrestling action, yakisoba noodles and free sake made us understand why the sport is followed so religiously in Japan. With the lousy weather keeping us homebound this weekend, it seemed like a good time to start researching the 2008 event, as we’re anxious to see the return......

After the holidays, some offices are feverishly trying to catch up on missed work, while others are still lounging in the holiday lull, trying to look busy. Here are a few popular sites for goofing around, or taking a little break from that feverish bean-counting. Just try not to laugh so hard you disrupt the entire office. I usually avoid adorable animal sites, but you have to forgive me, Stuffonmycat.com is hysterical. This site even......

ART PARTY Gallery W13's Rebirth of Green/Pre-New Year’s Eve Art Party "will be a celebration of healthy living with nature and a tribute to the resurgence of all things organic. The focus of the evening will be all things creative -- art, film, furniture, music and food -- presented with organic and green flair." The night includes a film screening of Black Gold, a live Latin Jazz/World Beat DJ, and featured artists include Nurha De......

Holidays have you indulging a little more than usual? Just in time for those New Year resolutions and post-holiday diets, the Wii Fit is expected to be released in North America in January. Released earlier this month in Japan, Wii Fit sold over a quarter million units in the first week. The game was designed for families to exercise with activities like stretching, yoga, step aerobics, push ups, jogging and much more. The additional......

MUSIC: CalTech isn’t just about nerdy rocket scientists. They have glee clubs, too! All kidding aside, tonight's concert will feature traditional holiday favorites as well as the Women's Club taking on Porpora’s Magnificat, written in the 1730s. 8 pm // Dabney Lounge at California Institute of Technology // 1200 East California Blvd., Pasadena // Free. DANCE: From CalTech, we’ll head over to CalArts in Valencia. The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance is holding its......

Its no wonder that Puffy AmiYumi are the huge international superstars that they are because even though they sing in a language you don't understand, they are irresistibly charming and their songs will be stuck in your head for days. I guess it was an all ages show. I was standing next to the most angsty 12-year-old girl i have ever seen, but her along with everyone else had their fist pumping perpetually through......

But first - Kobe vetoed a trade! Baseball in the Coliseum - Just after it was announced that the Red Sox will open the exhibition season against Oakland in Japan, the Dodgers confirmed that the defending World Champs would play three games against the Blue Crew. The cool part? One of the games will be in the Coliseum as part of the Dodger's 50th anniversary in Los Angeles. Yes, it can be configured that way......

This Thursday and Friday, Los Angeles will see the first return in 30 years of one of its more singular musical forces: Ya Ho Wa 13. Active from 1969-77, the band produced nine LPs – and recorded enough for fifty-six more - of stunningly original psychedelic rock. Hardly anyone ever got to hear them, however, since they were entirely self-released and only available at the Source Restaurant on Sunset and Sweetzer during the last......

After the successful release of their new album "Honeycreeper", international pop duo superstars Puffy AmiYumi are touring some West coast cities inlcuding the Key Club in Los Angeles November 16th, and the House of Blues in Anaheim November 18th. Puffy AmiYumi epitomize the phrase "I'm huge in Japan", but they don't just stop there. They're huge everywhere. It's as if the Beatles were two Japanese chicks, and started mashing out records in the mid-90s. They're......

A brief overview of the new Takashi Murakami exhibit at the MOCA....

From time to time, LAist will take a look at the many book-to-film projects underway in Hollywood. We'll explore the books we love and why we're over-the-moon excited or just plain worried about the film projects that bear their name. The Lovely Bones -- When we first examined the books-to-film projects underway in Hollywood, we were on regular IMBD watch for casting updates about Alice Sebold's novel-about-to-be-film The Lovely Bones directed by Peter Jackson. So......

If you keep walking west down Hollywood Blvd past the nonsense of Hollywood & Highland, past the tourist and super heroes at the Chinese Theater and down the next block, you will find the Knitting Factory, tucked away beneath what was once a movie theater. Boasting three stages and tons of bands every night, the Knitting Factory comes to us via New York and has hosted some shows this year that LAist had a great......

Yes, you are not crazy. A very quick 3.5 earthquake struck to the north of the Valley at 12:23 p.m. A quake last night in Peru, registering at 8.0, killed 450 and had aftershocks of 6.3. Today in the Solomon Islands was a 6.7 and a 5.3 in Japan (add to that a 5.3 in Hawaii a few days ago). It may have been a dry summer, but Earthquake season might be upon us this......

How good is Oreskaband, the all-girl teenage Japanese ska band? They're so good that after two weeks of non-stop rocking blogging and partying at SXSW in Austin (highlighted by our first exposure to Oreskaband at their show at the Elysium), and after a stressful flight home, instead of taking a break from rock shows we landed in LA, unpacked, and hit the Knitting Factory to see our favorite new discovery play again at Japan......

Cardinals 12, Dodgers 2 - At least the Dodgers took the first game from St. Louis. They were hammered in the rubber game, as Mark Hendrickson allowed eight runs on 11 hits in just 2 and 2/3 innings. Andre Ethier was the only Dodger holding up the offense, with a double, triple, and RBI. Angels 6, Twins 2 - The Angels shut down Minnesota in three straight games this weekend. Jared Weaver lasted 7.1 innings......

Ohhh, that was a nice 20 to 30 second rumbler too. Tonight's 4.5 earthquake, minutes before 1:00 a.m., comes on the heels of last night's 7.5 quake in Indonesia, Southern Japan's 6.4 earthquake and a Earthquake Conference, sponsored by SCAG, that took place yesterday morning in Ontario. The epicenter is in the Santa Susana Mountains north of the intersection of the 118 freeway and Topanga Canyon Blvd. near the split of the San Fernando and......

Jesse Harris, New York based singer/songwriter’s new album Feel, definitely has one doing just that. Not only is Feel his 7th album to date, he just recently wrote and composed, but not performed the entire soundtrack to Ethan Hawke’s film The Hottest State. While the soundtrack for the film has Harris performing just two of the songs and the likes of Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, M.Ward, Norah Jones and Cat Power taking hold of......

Photo by Henry David for LAist.com The 6.5-acre Japanese Garden in Van Nuys is open 5 days a week. It was opened to the public in 1984 and has since served as an ideal place of rest and meditation. It is conveniently located close to the 405 freeway in the Valley -- we encourage you to take a visit. It usually has only a handful of visitors and offers more than enough space to......

Carole Meyers, the first female rabbi to lead a congregation in L.A., died at age 50 of bone cancer this past Thursday. A month-old wildfire in Santa Barbara County continued to grow and burned through another 1,000 acres, prompting evacuation orders for a dozen homes. An LAPD officer was killed earlier today after crashing his motorcycle on the 101 freeway. The Belmont Shore team won the 2007 ViewSonic Long Beach Dragon Boat Festival yesterday.......