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 ...
Until June 8, 2008, Hiroshi Yuasa led an ordinary life, one of thousands of taxi drivers who work Tokyo’s streets. But just after noon on that rainy Sunday, as shoppers thronged the streets of Akihabara, he witnessed an event that changed everything. Sitting in ...
Japan marked the 50th anniversary of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty on Jan. 19 amid calls for an inquiry into the dispatch of Japanese Self-Defence Forces to Iraq, which critics say was illegal. But in contrast to the fierce debates over the origins and legitimacy ...
Just as for the United States, the cost to Japan of the Iraq adventure has not been limited to the financial. A series of test cases against antiwar activists has dismayed lawyers and human-rights activists, who say the post-9/11 Japanese state is attacking constitutional ...
General Toshio Tamogami, 61, was the chief of staff of Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force between March 2007 and November 2008 despite having a history of lobbing verbal missiles at “leftists,” China and Japan’s so-called war-renouncing Constitution. In 2008, he pulled these and other themes ...
As a historic general election looms on Aug. 30, Japan’s long-suffering electorate faces a clear choice: vote for the conservative party that has virtually monopolized power since 1955, or opt for its more liberal but untested rival, which promises long-awaited reform. For those with ...
Illegal arrests, forced expulsions, “kidnappings” by security police and beatings by hired thugs. No, it’s not another dispatch from a violent banana republic. Those accusations come from the leafy back-streets of Ichigaya, Tokyo, home to a branch campus of the prestigious Hosei University. Hosei ...
Last month a group of activists called Dystopia Tokyo called a protest against what they described as a “Draconian” new city ordinance by conservative Gov. Shintaro Ishihara. Ishihara was revising an existing public safety law to allow “Orwellian” city-center crackdowns on street demos, public ...
Despite being Japan’s most densely populated area, Warabi rarely causes a blip on the national media radar. Set in a rusting corner of Saitama Prefecture, the city has two minor recent claims to fame: a communist mayor and the 13-year-old daughter of illegal Filipino ...
Around the nondescript Tokyo suburb where she lives with her three children, Jane is a well-known face. Foreign in an area crowded with Japanese, she has taught English for years here among neighbors who greet her warmly on the street. Few know that her ...
For years, Arlan and Sarah Calderon fretted over when to tell their daughter, Noriko, that she was different. Dark-haired and olive-skinned, she looked indistinguishable from the children she walked to school with every day in Warabi, an everyman suburb of Saitama Prefecture. But unknown ...
