Transport authorities launched a full-fledged investigation Sunday into the derailment of a bullet train on the Akita Shinkansen Line in Daisen, Akita Prefecture, on Saturday afternoon.
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 ...
Friends visiting Japan often ask me why there are no, or very few, Wi-Fi hotspots available at hotels and cafes in Tokyo. They mention that in their countries, many places offer free Wi-Fi for guests — often it is completely open, or you simply ...
Hatena is a Kyoto-based company that has run several web services since 2001. Similar to Digg, Delicious or Reddit, it has grown a web-savvy, tech-oriented community around a Q&A service (from which its name, Japanese for “question mark,” is gleaned), free blog-hosting, and so ...
Tokyo-based Internet company Istyle Inc. announced on Feb. 3 its intention to list itself on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers Market (Tosho Mothers). The planned date of the IPO is March 8, 2012. Istyle’s flagship service @Cosme (pronounced “atto kosume,” — www.cosme.net) is the ...
You may have heard that the underbelly of the Japanese Web revolves around a massive bulletin-board service called 2-channel (pronounced ni-channel), where people can post messages anonymously. For Japanese, who find it difficult to freely express their opinions in public, that anonymity has meant ...
Over the past year, major U.S. social-media services have made some serious inroads into Japan. Here are some recent developments. Mixi vs. Facebook A report on Japanese social-networking services usage issued by Nielsen/NetRatings on Nov. 18 made a huge impact in Japan, as the ...
Japan’s two social-game-networking giants, Gree and Mobage, have been spending enormous amounts on producing TV advertising recently, and as a result they have each attracted approximately 20 percent of the population to their services, selling vast number of virtual items. In the West it ...
Tokyo-based IT company Milog is known for providing Android-based smartphone apps that let users share information about the apps installed on their phones and rank them by popularity. This small startup, established in 2009, has been supported by notable companies, including receiving a ¥310 ...
Over the last month or so, a new social service has risen out of the blue in the Japanese Web. The Interviews, as the service is called, was launched on July 31 by Tokyo-based Internet company Paperboy & Co. Inc., which said the service ...
It seems that everywhere you look in Japan these days, printed advertising has Internet-style “search buttons” somewhere in the design, with Japanese text inside a box indicating the term to be searched. And many TV commercials end with a short phrase “such and such ...
Despite only being in closed beta testing at the moment, Google’s new social-network service, Google+, is rapidly proving to be huge, with more than 10 million users joining since it was announced on June 28. And thanks to their international connections, Net-savvy Japanese too ...
