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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 ...
Any well-aimed dart of wit depends upon accurate release. Timing is all, and at first glance a collection of 1990s humor from “The Alien,” a popular Nagoya-based ex-pat magazine featuring irreverent satire and visual gags, may seem dated. That the compilation still makes the ...
On his second-ever professional tour in Europe, dancer Naoki Takagishi fought through injuries as he worked with modern-dance choreographer Maurice Bejart for the first time. “I was only 22 years old,” Takagishi tells The Japan Times. “Mr. Bejart first saw me dance before the ...
In 1941, in the then Dutch East Indies, thousands of people were forced into internment camps by the invading Japanese army. It is a slice of history almost forgotten today, along with so many other wartime atrocities. It is something Chieko van Santen remembers ...
Megumi Nishikura, a young documentary filmmaker in Tokyo, consolidates her goals under one main theme: “I want to remind us of our common humanity, to remember that we are all humans with the same hopes and desires and we all deserve to be respected. ...
For Deborah Davidson, Hokkaido is not only home, it is a door to other worlds. As a child, she played with Ainu children and watched them care for the frolicking cubs of the “iomante” (bear ceremony). As a translator, she now focuses on bringing ...
Jay Gregg, a resident of Kyoto since 1980, starts each day with a “bowl of matcha and a few tunes.” The music drifts through his living space, across his Kano School art collection, and brings back memories of his banjo-strumming university days at Colorado ...
No matter how warm and sunny the day, there’s always a chill in Mandarado Yagura, a samurai graveyard in Kotsubo, right at the boundary between Kamakura and Zushi in Kanagawa Prefecture just south of Yokohama. In this secreted locale little more than an hour ...
March and After, by Jon Mitchell. Printed Matter Press, 2011, 34pp., ¥1,000 (paperback) “March and After” brims with pithy song, but it is not merely a collection of poetry. The slim volume cuts with journalistic economy and biographical precision. Yet, its author, Jon Mitchell, ...
When Mark Rubiner drove tens of thousands of kilometers from Arizona to Mexico and through South America when he was only 21 years old, his high school Spanish skills became a key tool for survival. Although the trip took place over 40 years ago, ...
Take any teenager nearly 10,000 km (6,000 miles) from home on their first-ever overseas trip and you are bound to reap wonder. For 16-year-old French ballerina Sylvie Guillem, who came to Tokyo with the Paris Opera Ballet School in 1981, that wonder grew into ...
The undulating sea observes the solitary walker. A triangular bamboo farmer’s hat shades his face as the infinite horizon stretches ahead, marking out his path. While most of us feel lucky to pleasantly pass a few hours in a leisurely trek, Thomas Kohler ambles ...
Rarely does life offer a clear-cut crossroads, but Heather Willson, a 34-year resident of Japan, faced one squarely when she was 22 years old. “I first came to Japan for one year during my undergraduate work in 1973, and I loved it so much ...