In 2008, Toyota faced an embarrassing problem: The Imperial Family's luxury Century Royal, used to carry Crown Prince Naruhito around Japan, was a dud.

Like most corporate giants, Toyota isn't all squeaky clean. Yet in their book "Toyota no Shotai" ("The True Colors of Toyota") published in Japanese in 2006, Hajime Yokota and Makoto Sataka catalog the Japanese media's timidity when it comes to covering the nation's top ...

Tanya Spotts, a real estate agent from Hamilton, Virginia, bought a new Lexus E350 in 2011. This is her story. “I had been driving it six months and it was near Christmas and my 22-year-old daughter was with me. I was parking in a ...

It's prayer time at Tokyo's biggest mosque and the congregation is pondering God, community and Naoki Inose, the city's governor, who many here say has revealed himself to be, well, a bit of a bigot.

In rock mythology, John Lennon was the cynical, acid-tongued Beatle, Paul McCartney was friendly and open, George Harrison was the quiet one and drummer Ringo Starr was the group’s clown, always joking around. Satoko Condon remembers it a bit differently. “Ringo was a bit ...

Bad guys rarely live up to their reputation, and so it was with James Blackston. Portrayed in the Irish media as a fearsome, muscle-bound rapper, in court he was a diminutive, baby-faced figure, his tattoos covered up by a cheap prison suit, mumbling his ...

Angela Furlong is trying to recall her darkest point in the trial of the man accused of murdering her daughter. Was it the moment she faced him in court after months of living in dread?

It was a year dominated by Japan’s spats with its most powerful neighbors, China and South Korea, over tiny specks in the sea, and by national soul-searching over nuclear power and the calamity that struck Japan in March 2011. It ended with the stunning ...

Akihiro Suzuki does not think war will come, but if it does, he believes Japan will prevail. “Of course, in general military terms China is more powerful,” says the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly lawmaker. “But with the weapons and technology we have from America, we ...

In the immediate aftermath of last year’s Fukushima triple meltdown, Japan’s government and pronuclear experts scrambled to dampen public concern. Experts waved away fears about radiation, cabinet ministers scoffed at comparisons to Chernobyl, and the word “meltdown” itself was effectively scoured from the media. ...

It is one of the more ugly tasks in journalism: trying to extract a quote from a bereaved family after a violent death. By the time I called Nicola Furlong’s mother on May 25, she had learned that her 21-year-old daughter had been sexually ...