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A sit-in by visa violators and their families entered its second day Tuesday in front of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau with protesters seeking government good will. The action at the bureau in Minato Ward is being organized by the Asian People’s Friendship Society, ...
Kazuhiro Shiraishi, 66, is a guest-house manager in the Izu-kogen Highlands, a famous resort area on the Izu Peninsula of Shizuoka Prefecture. Looking out onto the Pacific Ocean, and just 90 minutes by train from Tokyo, Izu has a warm climate all year round ...
“I was stopped by two men in a government-registered vehicle, blindfolded and dragged off the street. They took me away to a house in a place I did not know. I was forced into a room with blood all over the walls and floor, ...
Takashi Miike's blood-soaked vengeance tale, one of two Japanese films being shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, draws the biggest boos so far, with critics savaging it as overacted and cliched.
Have you ever given your best effort while striving to achieve something but felt like what you were doing was futile? That’s the feeling I’m getting about Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Olympics. With just over three months to go until the IOC ...
My 10-year-old is in the school basketball club but is thinking about switching to another club. He’s been agonizing over this decision, which tells you something about the importance of school clubs in Japan. School clubs here are different from anything we had at ...
In all my years of studying Japanese, I never learned the word I need right now. How do you say “nocturnal emission”? I need to know because my 10-year-old son is starting sex education at school, and I haven’t told him that part of ...
It’s been strangely quiet lately in the sixth-grade classrooms at my children’s school. When I looked in the other day, nearly half the seats were empty. I couldn’t understand why. A flu epidemic? Then I remembered. It’s juken season — entrance examination time. Our ...
My children are back in school after two weeks of winter vacation. We went skiing and took a few day trips around Tokyo, but the boys spent most of their vacation playing, reading and relaxing. Some of their school chums, however, had no break ...
The year’s end is a natural time for reflection. Every December, I take a break from the hectic activity of the season and sit down for a quiet cup of tea. I look back at the year passed and reflect on the year to ...
Pencils and computers haven’t replaced brushes at schools — brush work is alive and well. I just walked into the kitchen with my arms full of groceries and nearly tripped over my 10-year-old, who was kneeling on the floor. “What the heck are you ...
My 7-year-old is learning to play a uniquely Japanese instrument. The shamisen? No. The koto? No. Like virtually every other first-grader here, my son is learning to play the kenban hamonika (keyboard harmonica). If you’re not Japanese, you probably have no idea what I’m ...
A few weeks before my son started first grade, I asked my friend Nagako to help me read the list of school supplies I needed to buy. We were going down the list — hasami (scissors), iroenpitsu (colored pencils) — when we got to ...
On a recent observation day at the Japanese public elementary school that my children attend, I wandered into unfamiliar territory. I saw a mother entering a classroom I had never noticed. I followed her in and got quite a surprise. I had stepped into ...
I agreed to serve on the PTA of the Japanese elementary school my children attend, but on one condition: that I didn’t have to do any fundraising. A strange demand? Perhaps, but after three years of bake sales, book sales and candy sales at ...
The creators of “Sesame Street” are developing new content and materials to make the highly successful children’s television program more useful for Japanese children learning English. Aired on NHK for the past 30 years, “Sesame Street” has long been used by Japanese as a ...
When I brought my children to Japan a year ago, I expected they’d pick up on certain things faster than me. I did not, however, anticipate that they’d so quickly succumb to the Japanese national obsession with janken. Granted, janken is not unique to ...