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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.
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 ...
For Daisuke Yamamoto's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
At a time when North Korea’s erratic behavior has underscored the need for cooperation in Asia, Japan’s delicate ties with China and South Korea have become even more tenuous amid increasing displays of nationalism by the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The latest ...
With the New Year holidays over, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe faces the challenge of healing Japan-U.S. ties strained under Japan’s previous administration and of improving ties with China and South Korea, soured by various territorial disputes. Amid concerns over the perceived rightwing shift in ...
The first senior-level talks held between Japan and North Korea since August 2008 have resulted in an agreement to continue discussing Pyongyang’s past abductions of Japanese nationals, despite the two sides’ vastly differing agendas. Although a resolution of the decades-old abductee dispute is still ...
The yen’s historic surge since last summer has taken a breather, particularly in light of the Bank of Japan’s expansion of monetary easing earlier this month, lessening exporters’ pain and boosting stock prices. But it is unclear how long the trend will continue. Some ...
Hundreds of single men and women in countless cities across the country are hopping from bar to bar every weekend in search of soul mates, or just to get to know the opposite sex, at parties known as “machikon.” A sign of just how ...
Japan may have found a silver lining in the March earthquake, seeking to sell bullet trains abroad, as the high-speed train system proved resilient against the powerful 9.0-magnitude temblor of March 11. Shinkansen have long been synonymous with safety. But experts and government officials ...
A senior Danish negotiator on climate change has urged relevant governments to deliver on their pledges to fight global warming under the nonbinding Copenhagen Accord, given that a post-Kyoto Protocol treaty still appears years away. In an interview in Tokyo, Bo Lidegaard, permanent undersecretary ...
For Henry Killackey, a well-traveled tourist from Los Angeles, Tokyo Sky Tree was the first place he wanted to visit upon arriving in Tokyo for the New Year’s holidays. The communications tower, now going up in Sumida Ward, one of Tokyo’s traditional “shitamachi” districts, ...
Political parties and candidates hoping to use the Internet to appeal to today’s tech-savvy voters were disappointed when the Diet failed to make it legal in time for the July 11 Upper House election. But with both the ruling and opposition parties eager to ...
ISAHAYA, Nagasaki Pref. (Kyodo) Like many of his friends in rural Nagasaki Prefecture, Shigeyuki Nakao has always voted for Fumio Kyuma, the Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker who has served as the nation’s defense chief several times. But now, Nakao, 67, a pensioner in the ...
The Democratic Party of Japan’s policy platform, which pledges large spending projects and an end to expressway tolls, has raised questions about exactly how such projects would be financed. The proposed establishment of a politician-led governing structure and measures aimed at boosting the role ...
The close of 2008 finds the Defense Ministry and Self-Defense Forces bogged down with scandals and misdeeds involving personnel. But as they enter 2009 — and the new U.S. administration led by Barack Obama enters the scene — they face uncertainties over how the ...