17
RAIN
Farmers in the city of Tamura, Fukushima Prefecture, have begun planting rice in a district once designated a no-go zone because of radioactive fallout ejected by the disaster-hit Fukushima No. 1 power plant.
Recently I was asked to write a blurb for a new liquid plant-nutrient. As soon as I saw the name of the product, 早根早起 （Hayane Hayaoki), I smiled at this example of linguistic creativity.
Life in Japan just seems tailor-made for certain foreign residents, who slip into the fabric of this society as smoothly as a hand slides into a glove. American Curtis Patterson, a professional koto player and music teacher, is a case in point. Not only ...
Denmark’s Emmelie de Forest won this year’s Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday night with her ethno-inspired flute and drum tune “Only Teardrops,” despite tough competition from spectacular stage shows by performers from Azerbaijan and Ukraine. Juries and television viewers across Europe awarded the barefoot, ...
One team’s quest for a first title has ended. The other team’s fight will continue next season. The Yokohama B-Corsairs outplayed the Rizing Fukuoka in Sunday’s bj-league championship game, controlling the tempo for larger stretches and making enough timely baskets to fill an instructional ...
It may not be a popular notion, but family finances appear to be one of the most important factors in determining a child’s academic capabilities. Research by Ochanomizu University professor Hiroaki Mimizuka, reported at a recent academic conference of the Japan Society of Educational ...
Wako University is holding an exhibition through Sept. 24 on Minamata disease at its campus in Machida, western Tokyo, aiming to show how the mercury-poisoning disease has affected Japan’s postwar society. The exhibition is being held to mark the 50th anniversary of official recognition ...
When he retired from his job at a cement maker in 2000, Yukio Ebisuzaki had no strong attachments to any of the eight cities he had lived in over his 40-year career, so he decided to return to his childhood home on a small ...
As a freelance photo journalist, Munesuke Yamamoto has witnessed numerous deaths in war zones around the world, but he is now focusing on the living, specifically elderly people in Japan. “I have realized I cannot depict a death without knowing about how he or ...
fliers on my days off for more than 30 years. “I was told when I became a central government employee in 1972 that engaging in political activities may result in punishment,” he admitted. However, his lawyers argued it was well-known that some government employees ...
In July 1988, Mizue Furui was in the Gaza Strip and West Bank with her camera as a rookie freelance journalist. Covering the Palestinian condition, she became acquainted with Ghada Ageel, a 23-year-old teacher at an elementary school, in November 1993 and started shooting ...
MINAMATA, Kumamoto Pref. (Kyodo) Sumiko Kaneko, 74, hopes to outlive, even by a day, her 50-year-old son, Yuji, who has been in a wheelchair the past nine years. “His condition is getting worse, and now even we family members do not understand what he ...
Records of a 30-year journey by a well-known researcher on Southeast Asia will soon be available to the public on a Web site operated by a research center at Saitama University. Until his death in 1994 at age 68, Yoshiyuki Tsurumi observed the social ...
SAITAMA (Kyodo) Kenichi Ino has held a grudge against the media since it defamed his daughter, Shiori, who was stalked and killed by her former boyfriend and his accomplices in Saitama Prefecture in 1999. “My family and I suffered not only from the death ...
Japan’s criminal justice system lacks a fundamental notion that is manifest in other parts of the democratized world: the presumption of innocence, according to human rights advocates. Suspects are still forced to make false confessions during interrogations in which legal representation is banned, and ...
Assets left by the late mother of a man on death row have allowed opponents of capital punishment to expand their financial support for convicted criminals facing the gallows. Using a 10 million yen fund named for Sachiko Daidoji, who died in May 2004 ...
Some 1,300 Japanese citizens left for “a promised land” in the Caribbean almost 50 years ago, encouraged by a government-sponsored emigration program. In the Dominican Republic, which the government called a “Caribbean Paradise,” each family was supposed to receive fertile farmland. What they actually ...