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The consumption tax increase next April will hit every household in Japan hard, with many people's financial future hanging on whether their wages rise enough to offset the impact of the hike, experts say.
Every parent is all too familiar with The Tantrum. The screaming, the flailing arms, the angry head butting — and the timing (normally in the most inconvenient public place possible).
International events undermine Japan's democracy. Shame on the International Olympic Committee for being a party to it.
Tucked away behind the main museums in Ueno, the Tokyo University Art Museum may not be on most people’s radar, but it is definitely one of the city’s top museums in terms of curatorial quality. Whenever I go there, I am always delighted by ...
Francisco Liriano showed up at PNC Park on Tuesday afternoon in a suit with his suitcase packed for a trip St. Louis. The message reverberated through the Pittsburgh Pirates clubhouse. After 21 years away from the playoffs, it was time for the best story ...
Akky Akimoto writes for Asiajin.com, an English/Spanish blog on the Japanese web scene. He is also an in-house blogger for Cybozu Labs, which helped him get over 120,000 tech-loving Twitter followers. He has worked as a localization engineer in the U.K., the U.S. and Vietnam as well as in Japan.
For Akky Akimoto's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Japan’s most popular online bulletin-board service, 2channel (pronounced ni-chaneru), recently experienced what is probably the biggest problem in its 14-year history when its promise to keep users’ anonymity was severely broken by an information breach. 2channel was founded by Hiroyuki Nishimura in 1999. It ...
Over the last month or so, the hottest topic on the Japanese Web scene has been inconsiderate and shocking behavior by convenience- and food chain-stores employees who messed about with appliances and food, and then boasted with photos on social media, mainly on Twitter. ...
Over the last decade, people’s behavior during their daily train ride has completely changed. In the past, Japanese were known to be avid readers of paperbacks (bunko) and manga magazines, and would do so even on Tokyo’s notoriously crowded trains. Now, however, it is ...
What Web services are hot in Japan? One indicator that a company’s business is growing and that it’s expecting more growth is when it lists on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) with an IPO (Initial Public Offering). Today I’ll introduce a few Japanese Web ...
Google Glass is the latest mobile Internet gadget to grab headlines. Resembling a pair of glasses, the futuristic device enables wearers to access the Internet — in particular Google’s search, maps and translation functions — as long as they have a Wifi or Bluetooth ...
There must be very few homes in the developed world that don’t have a television, and Japan is no exception. Even in the Internet era, as terrestrial TV is slowly being replaced by networked TVs, cable channels and computers, regular TV broadcasting still makes ...
Apple Inc. has been always loved by people in Japan. Even during its toughest years, in the 1990s, after cofounder Steve Jobs had been expelled and the company was almost dead, its Macintosh computer held a much greater market share in Japan than in ...
If you search for the acronym MMD on Niconico or YouTube — the two most popular video-sharing sites in Japan — the resulting list will have over 100,000 anime videos, most of which have 3-D anime-style girl characters singing and dancing to electronic J-pop ...
In recent years, there have been several cases where Japanese media icons, especially those who shine across national and language borders, have been accused of falsifying their personal histories, and they have consequently lost whatever popularity they had gained through the mass media and/or ...
Twitter continues to ride high. Facebook has grown a lot, but newcomer Line seems set to overtake it. Social game companies Gree and Mobage have shifted their overseas expansion into high gear. And Mixi finally admits that it needs to try harder to understand ...
Despite the fact that Japan has the world’s largest market for digital-manga, which are primarily read on cellphones, and that Amazon has recently brought out its Kindle platform in Japan — after a delay of 5 years — the e-book business here has yet ...
In September, a major update of Apple’s iOS software for iPhones and iPads (iOS6) replaced the devices’ long-standing Google Maps application with Apple’s self-made Maps service. However, the new app soon caused outrage among iDevice users around the world due to the low quality ...