The death toll from a blizzard that hit Hokkaido and the Tohoku region over the weekend has risen to nine, local police said Monday. The latest fatality as of Monday was Kuniko Jingi, 76, who was found collapsed under the snow on a road ...
Sleeping in. Breakfast in bed. Sunny brunches. Strolls in the park. Laid-back afternoon tea. Cocktails at sunset. Decadent late nights. Saturday — the word brings to mind a flurry of images associated with the first day of the weekend and the chances are, they ...
For the past year, Tokyo sixth-grader Manami has had dinner at home an average of four times a week. The rest of the time she has had to make do with a juku-ben, a boxed dinner prepared by her mother and consumed between classes ...
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, ...
Cuba overpowers China, winning 12-0 and advancing to the second round of the World Baseball Classic.
Traveling to 46 World Heritage cities in 18 countries is impressive enough on its own, but painting them is another thing entirely. Yet, Ecuador’s noted contemporary painter Oswaldo Munoz Marino has done just that. Marino came to Tokyo last week for an exhibition held ...
It was a small advertisement in the paper that led Koichi Yano to one of Canada’s leading circus companies, Montreal-based Cirque Eloize. It was 1996, he was in Canada helping his sister settle in and was still under the spell of a recent performance ...
For people moving to a foreign country, the simplest daily activities can become a nightmare. Take Siddharth Bambawale, a 27-year-old accountant, who found that the best way to do his shopping was to call his Japanese friends on his cell phone and get them ...
Some people — generally women — will do anything to lose weight. Slimming products range from the bizarre to the outright absurd — from balloons that claim to raise your body temperature and burn calories when you inflate them, to rubber suction cups that ...
At first glance, the visitor would hardly guess that the austere-looking building nestled in the beautiful, green mountains of Nasu Kogen, Tochigi Prefecture, is the Akiba Museum of Antique Jewellery — Japan’s first private museum specializing in European antique jewelry. But once you step ...
All it took for a small dental supply business to become the world’s largest independent manufacturer of nail products was one man’s realization that some of his biggest buyers of dental acrylics weren’t dentists at all they were manicurists. It was in the early ...
Everyone knows how hard it is to find clothes that fit, but imagine how much harder it would be if you had special needs. If you were a wheelchair-user looking for pants with gathers at the knees, or a frail senior looking for a ...
There was a time when virtually every city neighborhood had a public bathhouse. Those days are over, but the soothing waters haven’t completely dried up. Here in Tokyo, there is a variety of sento from which to choose. And if traditional bathhouses aren’t up ...
Insects aren’t everyone’s favorite animals, especially when it comes to those such as cockroaches, termites and wasps that frighten us as well as potentially harm us and our environment. Most people would do anything to rid their house of such pests. The Japan Pest ...
Although the shitamachi areas of Tokyo may have lost some of their bygone ambience, a few shops dating back to the Meiji or early Showa eras still remain. Sticking to tried-and-tested favorites, they are loved by customers old and new. Some have even appeared ...
