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 ...
At some point or another, a child nibbles at the world of questions: “Why are we here, where did we come from, how did the world start?” Most children swallow down partial answers and move on to soccer balls or Barbie dolls, but for ...
View the sun through a shitajiki, those transparent, decorative pencil-boards ubiquitous to elementary school children in Japan, and you can gaze, squint-free, into its rays. The world transforms when you look directly at the sun because perceptions shift. Shoichi Sakurai, 49, artist, discovered this ...
HAGAKURE: The Code of the Samurai, The Manga Edition, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Sean Michael Wilson, William Scott Wilson. Illustrated by Chie Kutsuwada. Kodansha International, 2010, 143 pp., $14.95 (paper) Manga can be elegant and artistic, but it also serves up raunch, romance and violence. ...
Imitation may be a form of flattery, but it is also an important first step for creative genesis. The 1952 premiere of “Yuzuru” by Ikuma Dan — half imitation of Western operatic traditions and half Japanese creative innovation — marked a milestone in the ...
The first two weeks of the new year are over, and Tom Gregersen, 61, is putting away the kine and usu, the traditional wooden mallets and mortars used in the mochitsuki (rice-cake pounding) event held as part of the O-shogatsu Festival at The Morikami ...
YOMIMONO 15, by Suzanne Kamata. CreateSpace, 2010, 115 pp., $10 (paper) Writers often gather in exotic places, finding inspiration in the unknown. Suzanne Kamata, long-term Japanese resident and writer, honors this literary tradition by editing an annual anthology of work by writers connected to ...
Krishna Murthy Vijayan, 57, has authentic taste — literally. Cooking in the traditions of southern India as head chef for T-Side, a popular Indian restaurant in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, he makes it a priority to keep his tastes authentic. Although he has lived more ...
Childhood, a time of purest innocence, is also a spring of dark imagination. Maurice Bejart, French choreographer and collaborator with the Tokyo Ballet in the 1990s, took the childhood and life of writer Yukio Mishima as his muse when creating the original ballet “M” ...
On the back of Maurice Joosten’s business card, a silvered phrase floats across the otherwise blank expanse: “Solve et Coagula” (“Dissolve and Unite”). For Joosten, 48, this ancient dictum of alchemy provides a motto linking his work as an artist, aroma designer and yoga ...
It sits in a place of beauty, incongruously bordered between Japanese stone art and a vivid blue ink painting: “2000 A.D.,” a classic British comic book from the 1980s. The apocalypse orange cover shrieks “Revenge of the Warlock” but — muted by a plastic ...
