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Tokyo Skytree will celebrate its first anniversary Wednesday but has not yet completed its prime mission of reliably broadcasting to households in the capital and its suburbs. Since December, the world’s tallest free-standing tower, at 634 meters high, has been making test broadcasts to ...
If you work in an office, you probably spend a fair part of your time sitting at a desk, which, of course, isn’t very healthy. To combat that the Pomodoro technique recommends that you work in intervals with regular breaks — for example, 25 ...
“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, ...
“Outsider art” is relatively new in Japan and, as a genre, works made by self-taught Japanese artists are still not very well known on the category-delineating, label-loving international art scene. Now, though, “Souzou: Outsider Art from Japan,” an exhibition on view (through June 30) ...
After all these years, Rafael Nadal still knows how to dominate Roger Federer. In the 30th meeting between the two tennis greats, Nadal controlled the final from start to finish to win 6-1, 6-3 Sunday for his seventh Italian Open title. “Rafa was just ...
THE BLUE-EYED SALARYMAN by Niall Murtagh. Profile Books, 2006, 228 pp., £7.99 (paper). The phenomenon didn’t start with Lafcadio Hearn, but in his day he became best known for it — the foreigner who comes to Japan and writes a book about his experiences. ...
An air of seclusion still hangs over Shikoku. This is despite the building of Japan’s greatest civil-engineering white elephants — three grandiose and grandiosely debt-ridden bridge systems that span the Inland Sea and connect the island with Honshu. The smallest of this country’s four ...
To visit Kyoto is often to experience what Oscar Wilde thought of Wagner’s music — beautiful moments, but bad quarters of an hour. The time spent soaking up the splendors of its temples and gardens seems slight at the side of those long bus ...
You get them in research institutes, tucked away in small caves, perched atop spanking-new urban developments. Clamber up Mount Fuji and one is waiting there at the summit. Aside from desperately keen Shintoi aficionados, few people would complain that Japan suffers any dearth of ...
RING, SPIRAL, LOOP, by Koji Suzuki. Vertical Publishing, 2003-2005, each $24.95 (cloth). One cinematic treat that 1998 turned out was “Ringu,” which was the rarity of a well-worked, intelligent horror flick that won broad appeal among movie fans who ordinarily look askance at efforts ...
They may be unloved and unwanted, but even their detractors would have to admit that Japan’s crows are tough, resilient critters. It is, then, entirely appropriate that the oldest castle in Japan should be named after these intimidating birds. The Japanese of yore had ...
Glaciers are in retreat, global weather patterns are going haywire and the Earth’s climate is the warmest it’s been in a millennium. Nonetheless, every winter, as regular as clockwork, winds from Siberia howl across the Sea of Japan, siphon up moisture, and dump it ...
From the soaring beeches in the forests of northern Honshu’s Shirakami-Sanchi to the funereal Buddhist gloom of Koyasan in Wakayama Prefecture, those who let UNESCO be their guide will find no dearth of variety among Japan’s World Heritage Sites. Of the places in this ...
You quit the airport and drive along roads flanked with palm trees, past fields of tall sugar cane and stone-walled gardens bristling with red hibiscus flowers, and it’s clear that you’ve arrived in a very different part of Japan. Ishigakijima Island might be the ...
Jutting south from Mount Fuji into the Pacific, the Izu Peninsula has something of a holiday air about it. The warm Kuroshio current flowing northward lends the peninsula a mild climate, and its position close to the suture lines of shifting tectonic plates means ...
The name in Ainu means “the end of the Earth.” And the bleakness and ruggedness of this lonely peninsula jutting out into the Sea of Okhotsk are such that little imagination is required as to how the Ainu — the indigenous people of Hokkaido ...
Long before the ballyhooed construction in the 1980s and ’90s of the three stupendous bridge systems linking Honshu with Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s main islands was by far the least visited. But despite the completion of those civil-engineering white elephants, Shikoku has pretty ...