I recently had cause to look through the various photos I’ve snapped over the past few years and came across this reminder of my time in Beijing:

The ‘Swing Bar’ on Bar Street became a regular haunt and featured this fantastic collection of musicians who would do their best to perform almost any song requested.

Last weekend, a friend — Dede — invited me to the Tokyo 12th annual ‘Foreign Students’ Music Contest’ in which she was competing.

Performances ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime; the audience watched a Jackson-esq dance routine set to ‘Smooth Criminal’ followed closely by a performance of traditional Japanese Noh-style drumming.

I snapped a couple of the photos of Dede’s Indonesian group performing a SMAP number and was lucky enough to catch Dede in full swing with her ‘angklung‘: