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 ...
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Tokyo and Washington are mulling the installation of an X-band radar system at an Air Self-Defense Force base in Kyoto Prefecture to build up Japan’s missile defense system and counter the North Korean ballistic missile threat, sources close to bilateral ties revealed Saturday. The ...
U.S. officials made two clandestine visits to North Korea last year in an effort to improve relations after Kim Jong Un assumed power in Pyongyang, media reports reveal.
Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard says it has captured a foreign unmanned aircraft during a military exercise in a southern area of the country.
If love is the drug, then chemistry explains everything, right? That seems to be the premise of the four-part miniseries “Renai wa Kagaku da” (“Love is Science”; Fuji TV, Mon.-Fri., 11 p.m.). Four popular young female TV personalities — LiLiCo, Shelly, Mizuki Yamamoto and ...
Toxic smog that is spreading to Japan from China almost certainly exceeded the central government’s maximum limit in Fukuoka on Saturday, local officials said. The Fukuoka Municipal Government reported Saturday morning that the average amount of PM2.5 particulates — an air pollutant found in ...
A South Korean man hurled human feces into the Japanese Embassy in Seoul on Friday to protest Tokyo’s sovereignty claim to a pair of islets controlled by South Korea, but he was freed by police despite carrying out an identical attack last August, Yonhap ...
Marking his 53rd birthday Saturday, Crown Prince Naruhito said he has been enjoying a “fruitful time” with Emperor Akihito by regularly discussing his role as a symbol of the state and various other issues. “The Emperor talks about what he felt and experienced, so ...
A former vice mayor of Higashiura in Aichi Prefecture has been arrested for allegedly padding the population data of the town, which is aiming to upgrade its administrative status to that of a city, prefectural police said. Hideo Ogisu, 63, denied violating the statistics ...
Saying it has “served a certain mission,” the organizing committee of a major rally against the deployment last year of MV-22 Ospreys to a U.S. air base in Okinawa announced Friday it will disband. Comprising representatives of the Okinawa Prefectural Assembly and other municipal ...
Akie Hoshi never imagined she would be able to find work in her hometown of Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, just a year after the tsunami spawned by the Great East Japan Earthquake smashed into the coastal city, erasing entire districts. Yet Hoshi has been working ...
Washington KYODO Prime Minister Shinzo Abe presented President Barack Obama with a golf putter made by a Japanese manufacturer during their meeting Friday at the White House, a government official said. In 1957, Abe’s grandfather, the late Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, and then-U.S. President ...
Tokyo and Manila have reaffirmed that they will bolster defense cooperation in response to the recent bellicose actions and rhetoric of Beijing, which is seeking to expand its maritime interests in the East China and the South China seas. The agreement came in vice ...
More top seeds tumbled out of the Match Play Championship on Friday, making the word “upset” more a description of the mood of the losers than any shock at the results in golf’s most unpredictable tournament. Luke Donald, the No. 3 seed who is ...
Rebounding is all about desire, technique, hustle and even a few lucky bounces here and there. And a 19-rebound game is also about basketball IQ, which is something Ryukyu Golden Kings big man Jeff Newton has a lot of. A five-time champion in the ...
Former Bolton star Fabrice Muamba will present the League Cup to the winning captain in Sunday’s final between Bradford City and Swansea City at Wembley. Muamba will be the sponsor’s guest of honor and will also watch the match from the Royal Box as ...
Recall our column from last summer pointing out how there are very few catchers in Japanese baseball who can hit? One of the suggestions I made to hopefully improve the situation was for the Japanese teams to see if they can find a halfway ...
In a rare gesture of goodwill, members of the U.S. freestyle wrestling team shook hands with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Friday after finishing third in a tournament. Iran and the U.S. have found a common ground in wrestling lately after the sport was ...
East Rutherford, Newark or Brooklyn. The Houston Rockets win no matter where the nomadic Nets call home. James Harden and Carlos Delfino each scored 22 points, and the Rockets tied their longest winning streak against any opponent by beating Brooklyn for the 13th straight ...
For so long, pain has followed Tyson Gay around the track. If it wasn’t his hamstring giving him grief in a workout, it was his surgically repaired hip or groin. He’s almost grown accustomed to the ever-present aches that have haunted him over his ...
Lindsey Vonn’s right knee is healing quicker than her feelings over a world championship race she says should have been called off. The four-time overall World Cup champion remains unhappy about how she sustained a season-ending injury — two shredded ligaments and a broken ...
Former Wimbledon champion Petra Kvitova overpowered Caroline Wozniacki 6-3, 6-4 on Friday to reach the final of the Dubai Championships. She will next play Sara Errani of Italy, who defeated her doubles partner Roberta Vinci 6-3, 6-3. “She has a good forehand with a ...
After getting swept by the visiting Saitama Broncos on Friday, the Sendai 89ers on Saturday announced head coach Bob Pierce has been relieved of his duties. The 89ers are 13-21, including 5-11 at home. They are in eighth place in the 11-team Eastern Conference. ...
A Washington state judge rejected a lawsuit Friday aimed at undoing a deal to build a new professional basketball and hockey arena in Seattle — a key part of plans to bring the NBA back to town. King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North ...
Madison Bumgarner will follow Matt Cain in San Francisco’s starting rotation, though Giants manager Bruce Bochy says there will likely be some shuffling before the end of spring camp. “We can still tweak it,” Bochy said Friday. “I’ll keep saying that when I look ...
Reigning J. League player of the year Hisato Sato lit up the Xerox Super Cup with a spectacular goal to give league champions Sanfrecce Hiroshima a 1-0 win over Emperor’s Cup holders Kashiwa Reysol in the 2013 season curtain-raiser on Saturday.
Matt Birk’s final game was a Super Bowl victory. The veteran center of the Baltimore Ravens retired Friday after 15 pro seasons. “To cap it with a Super Bowl win, that’s a great thing,” the 36-year-old Birk said. “But, regardless of that, had that ...
Two-time defending World Baseball Classic champion Japan endures a scare one week before the start of the 2013 tournament, but backup catcher Ryoji Aikawa rescued his team.
Don Shula, the NFL’s career leader in coaching victories, will be honored with the Lamar Hunt Award given annually to an individual who helped to shape professional football. Shula will be honored on March 2 in Kansas City. The longtime Dolphins coach had a ...
The Chicago Blackhawks set an NHL record for the best start to a season, beating the San Jose Sharks 2-1 on Friday night to give them at least one point in their first 17 games. Blackhawks rookie Brandon Saad scored a short-handed goal early ...
Former Boston Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine has been hired as the athletics director at Sacred Heart University. The Northeast Conference university in Fairfield, Connecticut, said Friday that Valentine’s appointment will be formally announced next Tuesday. Valentine was fired in October after just one ...
Overall ski jumping World Cup champion Sara Takanashi fell just short in her bid for gold at the FIS World Nordic Ski Championships on Friday, taking a silver medal behind American rival Sarah Hendrickson. The 16-year-old Takanashi, coming off four consecutive World Cup wins, ...
The Justice Department joined a lawsuit Friday against disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong that alleges the former seven-time Tour de France champion concealed his use of performance-enhancing drugs and defrauded his longtime sponsor, the U.S. Postal Service. The lawsuit alleges that riders on the postal ...
South African Paralympic icon and Olympian Oscar Pistorius was freed on bail Friday, pending a high-profile trial for shooting dead his girlfriend. Pretoria magistrate Desmond Nair ruled the “Blade Runner” was not a flight risk and did not pose a danger to society after ...
Adolf Hitler is running for election in India. So is Frankenstein. The tiny northeastern state of Meghalaya has a special fascination for interesting and sometimes controversial names, and the ballot for state elections Saturday did not disappoint. Among the 345 contestants running for the ...
A dozen elderly women are gathered inside the pink house, set on a narrow dirt road in a dusty Jakarta suburb. Together they sew, bake and chat. At first sight they look like a group of benevolent grandmothers, but the sunken cheeks and deep ...
Coils of Polish sausages glisten on shop counters and vodka bottles line the shelves. In this corner of the English countryside, much of the chatter is in Latvian or Lithuanian. Welcome to Boston, the most Eastern European town in Britain. Census data show that ...
The White House moved Friday to make nearly all federally funded research freely available to the public, the latest advance in a long-running battle over access to research that exploded into view last month after the suicide of free-information activist Aaron Swartz. In a ...
Syria’s opposition National Coalition said it was pulling out of several international meetings to protest the “international silence” despite the slaughter of civilians in the conflict. The announcement came after the coalition had said it would form a government to run “liberated areas” of ...
A sect named Defenders of Christ that was broken up in Mexico last month forced women to participate in orgies, discouraged baths and made people eat raw animal organs, the wife of a cult leader said Tuesday. Mexican immigration authorities raided the sex-driven sect’s ...
The mother of a British teenager who was raped and left to die on a Goa beach five years ago has blasted India’s “rubbish” legal system over the stalled trial into her daughter’s death. Scarlett Keeling was only 15 years old when her bruised ...
The mesas and canyons south of San Diego once held the most popular routes for illegal immigrants into the U.S. Dozens at a time sprinted across the border, passing agents who were too busy herding others to stop them. Now crossing would mean scaling ...
101 MODERN JAPANESE POEMS, compiled by Makoto Ooka, translated by Paul McCarthy, edited by Janine Beichman. Thames River Press, 2012, 144 pp., $45.00 (hardcover) When a new anthology of American poetry appears — The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove ...
They are the climax of Hollywood’s awards season, the 85th Academy Awards — except officially they’re not. This year, they’ve been rebranded as “The Oscars.” The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), which organizes Tinseltown’s biggest awards, did not confirm the change ...
Bollywood star and former Miss World Aishwarya Rai Bachchan has called for “immediate” action to protect women in India following the fatal gang-rape of a student that horrified the country. The vicious attack by a group of drunken men on a 23-year-old medical student ...
ORIGINS OF LOVE, by Kishwar Desai. Simon & Schuster, 2013, 496 pp., £7.99 (paperback) Kishwar Desai calls her novels social thrillers; books set in the beating heart of modern-day India that lay bare its caldron of inequalities, injustices and cultural traditions. The first, 2010′s ...
SALVATION OF A SAINT, by Keigo Higashino. Little Brown, 2013, 376 pp., £12.99 (hardcover) When the pregnant lover of a murder victim receives the sympathetic ministrations from the deceased’s wife at the funeral service, you know you are in no ordinary emotional terrain. This ...
Tomorrow morning can simply tune into The Oscars. Or you can watch them with the peanut gallery on Twitter. While Hollywood parades in tuxedos and gowns, grandly celebrating itself, a freewheeling cacophony of quips and sarcasm — something like a digital, million-times multiplied version ...
Seeing fewer years ahead and more behind me as a teacher, I often think back over the students who have passed through my classrooms and wonder how many will truly make a difference in the world.
In 1986, shortly before the beginning of Japan’s “bubble economy,” a department in the former Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) announced a plan named Silver Columbia 92. The project encouraged Japan’s private sector to develop “silver towns,” communities abroad that would attract ...
Donald Richie was a scrupulous writer who paid finite attention to language and content. The following are 10 outstanding choices — titles that should be on any discerning readers’ bookshelf. “Tokyo: A View of the City” (1999) Here Richie manages to give the impression ...
Nowadays, the name of the Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) is known throughout the world. But it wasn’t always like this — and it might never have been, without the efforts of Donald Richie. After Ozu’s masterpiece “Tokyo Story” was released in 1953, ...
Last week, entertainment-related media in the U.S. reported that the American Broadcasting Corporation had rejected an advertisement the animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wanted to air during the Academy Awards ceremony, which takes place early tomorrow morning Tokyo time.
THE REAL JANE AUSTEN: A Life in Small Things, by Paula Byrne. Harper, 2013, 400 pp., $29.99 (hardcover) Jane Austen may be too likable or lovable for her own good. “Pride and Prejudice,” which celebrates its 200th anniversary this year, was recently elected the U.K.’s ...
It was with a heavy heart that I heard from Donald Richie's longtime friend and editor Leza Lowitz that he had passed away on the morning of Tuesday, this week. He was 88.
It’s hard to think of February as springlike, what with snowfalls, freezing winds and a dusting of dead leaves everywhere. But I know from experience that the intrepid Prunus mume, or plum tree, blooms this month, and a trek to see some blossoms seems ...
Donald Richie was my friend and mentor for more than 20 years and my inspiration before that. When I was preparing to come to Japan for the first time in 1975, I read many books about the place, but Donald’s masterpiece “The Inland Sea” ...
