AP A car bomb exploded outside a mosque Sunday, killing at least 37 people and wounding another 141 in a mostly Shiite Muslim neighborhood in the southern Pakistan city of Karachi — the third mass-casualty attack on the minority sect in the country this ...
It's a dangerous, unpredictable world. Twice in January Chinese warships in the East China Sea challenged Japan's Maritime Self Defense Forces patrols in a manner deemed threatening. And on Feb. 12 came North Korea's nuclear test.
Here's an open secret: Japanese men have a bad international reputation on the romance front.
SELLING WOMEN: Prostitution, Markets and the Household in Early Modern Japan, by Amy Stanley. University of California Press, 2012, 282 pp., $49.95 (hardcover) In the vast cultural landscape, Japan fascinates the mainstream with manga and anime, the martial arts, Zen and kimono. Of course, ...
Kenta Maeda shook off worries about his form with five shutout innings as Japan beat China 5-2 in first-round Pool A of the World Baseball Classic on Sunday at Fukuoka Dome. Japan improved to 2-0 following a tough win over Brazil in Saturday evening’s ...
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Jan | Mar » | |||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | |||
Senegalese-born center Pape Faye Mour scored a season-high 21 points, including 9-for-10 at the free-throw line, and grabbed 11 rebounds to lead the visiting Yokohama B-Corsairs to a 97-83 victory over the Shinshu Brave Warriors on Saturday night. The B-Corsairs (23-8) climbed into first ...
Teammates of Kevin Youkilis were waiting to razz him when the third baseman walked into the New York Yankees clubhouse on Friday. Youkilis made the back page of two New York tabloids for telling reporters at his first day of spring training that “I’ll ...
Sweden’s Fredrik Jacobson birdied the two toughest holes at Riviera on his way to a 6-under 65 on Friday and a share of the lead with Bae Sang Moon after two rounds of the Northern Trust Open. Jacobson and South Korea’s Bae were at ...
Roberto Mancini’s pursuit of a trophy this season could be all but over by Sunday unless Manchester City can prevent Leeds from pulling off another upset in the fifth round of the F.A. Cup. The manager, though, is mocking those critics who suggest his ...
It’s time once again to gear up for the World Baseball Classic. The Samurai Japan team was to play its first WBC tuneup game on Sunday against the Hiroshima Carp at Sun Marine Stadium in Miyazaki. This will be followed by another warmup against ...
Melky Cabrera drew hugs from his new Toronto teammates, then trotted out his own mantra to deflect questions about last year’s drug suspension. The 28-year-old outfielder joined the Blue Jays at spring training on Friday. He was the MVP of the All-Star Game last ...
Ted Ligety has joined some of skiing's legends. And in doing so, the American catapulted himself into the sport's biggest spotlight heading into next year's Sochi Olympics.
Dwight Freeney and Austin Collie were not expected to be back with the Indianapolis Colts next season. On Friday, the team made it official by issuing a statement saying it would not re-sign Freeney, the Colts’ career sacks leader, or Collie, a key player ...
Matt Garrison did not set forth to reinvent the wheel when he was hired as the Niigata Albirex BB head coach for the 2011-12 season. So after replacing longtime bench boss Masaya Hirose, who was at the helm for 11 seasons in the team’s ...
Denver Nuggets second-year forward Kenneth Faried had 40 points Friday as Team Chuck routed Team Shaq 163-135 in the NBA’s Rising Stars Challenge game. Faried also had 10 rebounds and shot 18-for-22 from the field to collect MVP honors and kick off All-Star Weekend ...
Usain Bolt was in shock when he heard fellow Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius had been arrested and charged in the shooting death of his model girlfriend. In an interview on Friday night after the NBA’s All-Star celebrity game, the Jamaican gold medalist still couldn’t ...
Serena Williams secures her historic return to the top spot by rallying past Petra Kvitova in the Qatar Total Open.
Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida met with Okinawa Gov. Hirokazu Nakaima on Saturday to discuss the U.S. Futenma air base’s relocation, aiming to prepare the ground for his trip to Washington on Thursday with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Nakaima reiterated his opposition to relocating U.S. ...
Japan provides the slowest LTE high-speed wireless cellphone service among nine countries with advanced telecommunications networks, according to a study of download speeds. Sweden ranked at the top in average bandwidth speed with 22.1 megabits per second on its 4G network, while Japan brought ...
Only 23 percent of some 103,000 homes in seven prefectures had been fully decontaminated as of the end of December under a nuclear disaster government program, the Environment Ministry reported. The percentage was virtually unchanged from the previous survey conducted at the end of ...
Christian Ehrhoff and the Buffalo Sabres haven’t had much success this season, but they can claim one thing: They know how to beat the Boston Bruins. Ehrhoff scored the game-winner with 10:58 remaining and the Sabres rallied for three goals in the third period ...
Aiko Uemura finished third in the women’s moguls Friday in a World Cup Olympic test event at the venue for the 2014 Winter Games. It was Uemura’s second podium finish of the campaign following the season-opening competition in the dual moguls in Ruka, Finland, ...
Nice job, Roger Goodell. Here’s your pay: $29.49 million. NFL owners nearly tripled the commissioner’s compensation in the 2011 tax year and likely made Goodell the best paid commissioner in U.S. sports. According to the league’s most recent tax return, much of Goodell’s pay ...
The world governing body for wrestling on Saturday ousted its president, Raphael Martinetti, amid fallout from the International Olympic Committee’s controversial axing of wrestling as a core sport for the 2020 Summer Games. According to FILA vice president Tomiaki Fukuda, Martinetti was issued a ...
Mario Mandzukic scored against his former side as Bayern Munich maintained its Bundesliga title charge with a 2-0 win at Wolfsburg on Friday. Bayern’s 10th away victory from 11 games, and 18th overall, extended its advantage over Borussia Dortmund to 18 points ahead of ...
Finance Minister Taro Aso and his German counterpart, Wolfgang Schaeuble, have agreed that the two countries will continue to closely discuss economic and financial matters, a source said. During a 20-minute conversation Friday on the sidelines of a two-day meeting of Group of 20 ...
The European Union has agreed to immediately launch tests for equine DNA in meat products, seeking to reassure nervous consumers that their food is safe and to stop the continent’s horse-meat scandal from spreading. The program will also look for the presence of phenylbutazone, ...
The family of the suspect in last week's Guam rampage that left three Japanese dead and 11 people injured is remorseful for the tragedy, a local official says.
Berlin AP What is the difference between a meteor and a meteorite? Meteors are pieces of space rock, usually from larger comets or asteroids, that enter the Earth’s atmosphere. Many are burned up by the friction and heat, but those that survive and strike ...
The world got its first glimpse of Hugo Chavez since he underwent a fourth cancer-related surgery in Cuba more than two months ago, with photos released Friday showing the Venezuelan leader smiling alongside his daughters in Havana. Along with images of the puffy-faced Chavez ...
This superbly told tale about the waxing and waning fortunes of Kaminoseki town over the past four centuries presents some interesting local counterpoints to the more familiar national narrative.
A space rock even bigger than the meteor that exploded like an atom bomb over Russia could drop out of the sky unannounced at any time and wreak havoc on a city. And contrary to Hollywood, there isn’t much the world’s scientists and generals ...
Following North Korea’s third nuclear test last week, Japanese officials have expressed concern about the reclusive state’s possible progress toward fitting a miniaturized nuclear warhead atop a medium-range missile. Pyongyang has already successfully test-fired and deployed the Rodong-1 ballistic missile, which has a range ...
A 16-year-old from Kagawa Prefecture has won the best student award at the Gnessin Moscow Special School of Music, Russia’s top music school that has trained gifted children since the late 19th century. Kanon Matsuda, who studies piano at Gnessin, is the first foreigner ...
Their well-equipped arsenals offer everything from tiny revolvers for ladies to Berettas, Glocks, semiautomatic pistols and M16 military assault rifles. If kids can see over the counter, they’re welcome too. Forget the white sandy beaches, coral reefs and laid-back island culture. For many Japanese ...
A record number of journalists were imprisoned worldwide in 2012 in a “deteriorating environment for press freedom,” a leading media advocacy group said Thursday. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said in its annual “Attacks on the Press” report that 232 journalists were ...
Documents detailing the dubious fundraising practices of a disgraced Roman Catholic religious order called the Legion of Christ were released to the public Friday, showing how the organization took control of an elderly woman’s finances and persuaded her to bequeath it $60 million. The ...
THE NECESSARY DEATH OF LEWIS WINTER, by Malcolm Mackay. Mantle, 2013, 256 pp., ￡14.99 (hardcover) ‘It’s easy to kill a man,” you’re told by your omniscient narrator (more on the second person later). “It’s hard to kill a man well. People who do it ...
Washington THE WASHINGTON POST The meteor that exploded over Russia and injured at least 1,200 people Friday was astonishingly well-documented by amateur videographers, and much of the footage seems to have been captured from car dashboards. All of the available images raise the question: ...
An endangered plant or animal species symbolizes a world that changes irrevocably every moment, but there are also man-made things that vanish. This week, on the variety show “Takeshi no Nippon no Mikata” (“Takeshi’s Way of Viewing Japan”; TV Tokyo, Fri., 10 p.m.), comedian-filmmaker ...
In a school hallway, a teacher takes her students to the library, leading a single-file line of giggling boys and girls that is perfectly ordinary — until you get to a sleek white robot with a video screen showing the face of a smiling, ...
Inside a 13th-century monastery in a sleepy village north of Rome, the Rev. Salvatore Palumbo was allegedly serving more than one higher authority. Italian prosecutors say a Ferrari-driving lawyer who defrauded insurance companies used the priest as a front man, with Palumbo stashing the ...
News stories don’t exist in a vacuum. What often makes them “news” is a confluence of factors that provide a context of interest. Though the public thinks the current story about 15 female judo athletes (jūdōka) demanding fundamental changes to the way the national ...
For Yuji Hoshino, mushrooms were a way of life. The 50-year-old farmer grew up watching his father raise shiitake mushrooms on their land at the foot of the mountains in Sano, southern Tochigi Prefecture. Later, he became the one to yearly cut about 15,000 ...
If there was a birthday cake for the Brillia Short Shorts Theater, it would probably be an elegant, minimalist affair — no excessive decorations, nothing too calorific and five slim candles giving off a modest orange glow. One of just four movie theaters in ...
UNEXPECTED LESSONS IN LOVE, by Bernardine Bishop. John Murray, 2013, 378 pp., ￡16.99 (hardcover) This is a vibrant and even welcoming novel, though it’s substantially concerned with last things. Only the title lets it down, being a sort of kaftan, something designed to fit ...
The government is making arrangements to invite Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to Tokyo in mid-April, according to government officials. It is hoping to arrange a bilateral meeting between Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Suu Kyi if she can visit sometime between ...
Petri Artturi Asikainen would regularly accost strangers in Tokyo, on the streets, in parks or bars and on trains. With a high-end Nikon D3 digital SLR in his hands, the lanky and bespectacled Finn would ask — somewhat timidly summoning one of the few ...
100 YEARS AGO Sunday, Feb. 2, 1913 Tokyo Central station nears completion The Tokyo Central Railway Station, now under construction at Eiraku-cho, Kojimachi Ward [a now-defunct ward spanning much of present-day Chiyoda Ward], will, when completed next year, make one of the finest structures ...
North Korea test fired short-range ballistic missiles in the direction of the Sea of Japan between Feb. 1 and 10, an official of the Russian armed forces’ Eastern Military District said Saturday. The Russian Pacific Fleet has confirmed the missile launches at a target ...
INDIAN SUMMER, by Mieko Kanai, translated by Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley. Cornell East Asia Series, 2012, 149 pp., $24 (paperback) Mieko Kanai is a prolific and provocative contemporary author whose poetry and short stories have been appearing in English since the 1970s and ...
In a dry, dusty, desert landscape, the clamoring of cranes seems so surprising. I am used to the great winter assembly of more than 10,000 cranes in Kyushu at Izumi, where they congregate on winter-fallow rice fields; and I regularly frequent the winter gatherings ...
In his 1993 novel “Hanauzumi,” Junichi Watanabe pictures a prosperous farming village in Saitama. The year is 1868. The Meiji Restoration has just occurred. The shogun has been overthrown. The teenage Emperor Meiji has been conveyed from the ancient imperial capital of Kyoto and ...
For the past decade, the world's most powerful nations have turned to sanctions in an attempt to punish North Korea for a series of rocket launches and nuclear tests. Their stated goal: to stop North Korea's march toward acquiring an arsenal of nuclear-armed long-range ...
It starts to snow soon after the train leaves Koriyama, and further inland at Aizu Wakamatsu the snow is knee deep. My hosts, Nobuyuki and Mikiko, are waiting at the station. I’m relieved to see they’ve brought boots for me. Aizu has been part ...
Slightly more Japanese oppose allowing married couples to use separate family names than people who support changing the law, according to a new government survey.
A dozen paintings hang from the white walls of a gallery at the Museum of Modern Art in Hayama, Kanagawa Prefecture. Mostly prewar works by artists involved in the Proletarian movement, who focused on depictions of factory and farm laborers, the paintings are like ...
