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 ...
For Hillel Wright's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
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 ...
Without a shred of a doubt, 2011 stands out to me — in a way that hopefully will never be surpassed — as the most catastrophic I have ever known. March 11′s magnitude-9 Great East Japan Earthquake, followed by a monstrous tsunami and then ...
The first thing a good beach does is immediately make you want to take your watch off. But what makes a really great beach is when you do that — and then kick off your shoes as well. That’s exactly what I did when ...
