AP A car bomb exploded outside a mosque Sunday, killing at least 37 people and wounding another 141 in a mostly Shiite Muslim neighborhood in the southern Pakistan city of Karachi — the third mass-casualty attack on the minority sect in the country this ...
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 ...
Face it, you need to get out of Tokyo during the dog days of summer, when it gets like a fetid sauna. Yeah, you can while away a few hours at an outdoor beer garden and dull the pain, but basically you know you ...
PLEASE LOOK AFTER MOM, by Kyung-Sook Shin. Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, 256 pp., $24.95 (hardcover) This is an intimate drama brimming with sadness, suspense and surprises as the search for a missing mother in Seoul gives us glimpses into the heart of a family. ...
CHANGING POWER RELATIONS IN NORTHEAST ASIA: Implications for Relations Between Japan and South Korea. Edited by Marie Soderberg. Routledge, 2011, $125, 188 pp., (hardcover) From mid-March until mid-April, South Korean charities raised over $52 million for earthquake relief in Japan, a record sum that ...
TIANANMEN MOON: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising of 1989, by Philip J. Cunningham. Rowman Littlefield, 2010, 290 pp., $39.95 (hardcover) This is a gripping story told with page-turning brio by an American who had ringside seats for the gathering student protests in May 1989 ...
THE TALE OF KHUN CHANG AND KHUN PHAEN: Siam’s Great Folk Epic of Love and War. Translated and edited by Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit. Silkworm Books, 2010, 970 pp., $60 (hardcover) Those who like their novice monks prim and proper, taming desires, meditating ...
THE RISE AND FALL OF JAPAN’S LDP: Political Party Organizations as Historical Institutions, by Ellis S. Krauss and Robert J. Pekkanen. Cornell University Press, 2011, 318 pp., $26.95 (paper) Japanese politics is in a sad state these days with the media likening Diet debate ...
I happened to be in Chengdu during the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize wrangle. Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, an imprisoned human rights activist, became the third person to receive the prestigious award while in detention. When his prize was announced in October, Beijing denounced ...
In this wide-ranging feature following a recent visit to Chengdu, China, Jeff Kingston examines Sino-Japanese relations and challenges facing the government in Beijing Last December when I visited Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province in southwest China, people there were still agitated about Japan ...
A powerful earthquake devastated Sichuan Province in 2008 and recovery is still ongoing, but this prosperous and fertile region of southwest China has also suffered a series of man-made disasters. During the Great Leap Forward (1958-61), when as many as 45 million Chinese died ...
During the Senkaku/Diaoyu imbroglio following the Sept. 7, 2010 collision between a Chinese trawler and a Japan Coast Guard patrol vessel off disputed islands of those names in the East China Sea, some NHK and Asahi reporters emphasized that the anti-Japanese demonstrations in China ...
