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The consumption tax increase next April will hit every household in Japan hard, with many people's financial future hanging on whether their wages rise enough to offset the impact of the hike, experts say.
Every parent is all too familiar with The Tantrum. The screaming, the flailing arms, the angry head butting — and the timing (normally in the most inconvenient public place possible).
International events undermine Japan's democracy. Shame on the International Olympic Committee for being a party to it.
Tucked away behind the main museums in Ueno, the Tokyo University Art Museum may not be on most people’s radar, but it is definitely one of the city’s top museums in terms of curatorial quality. Whenever I go there, I am always delighted by ...
Francisco Liriano showed up at PNC Park on Tuesday afternoon in a suit with his suitcase packed for a trip St. Louis. The message reverberated through the Pittsburgh Pirates clubhouse. After 21 years away from the playoffs, it was time for the best story ...
For Hillel Wright's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Being naturally averse to traffic jams, long lines at airports, overcrowded trains and cranked-up hotel rates, I’ve never been one for traveling far on a national holiday in Japan, especially during Golden Week in May when a few of them cluster together. But this ...
In March this year, I spent a week in Taiwan as a guest of the Taiwan Fisheries Agency. My hosts had laid on a relentless daily schedule that took in a complete circuit of the island nation, visiting nearly all the major commercial fishing ...
Back in 1972 when I first lived on Denman Island in the Georgia Strait of British Columbia between Vancouver and Vancouver Island, I was one of about 300 residents. By the time I left 25 years later for Japan, its population had just topped ...
May and June are the months in which to visit Okinawa if your aim is to witness the spectacle of fiercely contested races between crews paddling dragon boats or the Ryukyu Islands' small traditional fishing boats called sabani.
Summer to me has always meant the beach, and now in the depths of winter it’s to sun-kissed strands and sparkling blue seas that my thoughts are prone to wander. In my childhood days, from kindergarten through high school, I was lucky enough to ...
An enjoyable experience is worth repeating. So when I finished teaching a two-week Summer Intensive at a university in Tokyo and was ready to return home to Okinawa, I decided to again take the ferry from Kagoshima as I had done the year before. ...
Where does an expatriate living in Okinawa go for a two-week summer holiday? Why, to Tokyo, of course — if it’s a working holiday — as there’s no better place in Japan to make good money than the Big Mikan. So, for the past ...
“The facts about much of Japan’s social, political, and financial life are hidden so well that the truth is nearly impossible to know,” writes Alex Kerr in his acclaimed 2001 study “Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan.” He continues, “A ...
Between 20 and 30 percent of Japan’s marine fisheries production was lost in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake that struck the Tohoku region of northeastern Honshu on March 11, 2011, followed by huge tsunamis and explosions and reactor meltdowns at the ...
Summers in Tokyo, indeed in most of Japan except for Hokkaido or Okinawa, are often unbearably hot and humid, with temperatures in the mid to high 30s and humidity reaching as high as 90 percent. This summer, in the wake of last year’s Fukushima ...
Robert Burns, the hard-living 18th-century Scottish poet, lyricist and culture hero who died aged 37 in 1796, is one of the most oft-quoted writers with roots in the British Isles. However, as he often wrote in the Scots language, many of his most famous ...
On the Autumnal Equinox of 2011 I finished teaching a monthlong summer intensive course at a university in Tokyo, and had six days before I had to be back in my new hometown of Naha, Okinawa, for a meeting at my new university in ...