Transport authorities launched a full-fledged investigation Sunday into the derailment of a bullet train on the Akita Shinkansen Line in Daisen, Akita Prefecture, on Saturday afternoon.
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 ...
There are two types of actors: ones who disappear into their roles and ones who make their roles disappear into them, playing versions of themselves in film after film. Ryo Kase is the former type, having portrayed everything from the sardonic punk pal of ...
Prior to interviewing Koichi Yamadera, a top voice actor, mimic and TV celebrity, I thought it would be tacky to ask him for samples of his many voices, from the characters on the popular “Anpanman” kiddy cartoon show to the hero of Hitoshi Takekiyo’s ...
Ever since her 2003 directorial debut “Hebi Ichigo (Wild Berries),” a black comedy about a dysfunctional family, Miwa Nishikawa has been exploring the infinite human capacity for duplicity and the elusiveness of truth. In 2006′s “Yureru (Sway),” two brothers sleep with the same woman ...
Religious con-men have probably been around as long as religion itself, though we have no way of knowing what scams fake shamans were running in the caves. For every Jesus, who had a low opinion of the rich and left little more than a ...
To call Ken Takakura an icon is almost an understatement. He is not only one of the few stars left from the heyday of the studio era, but he has for decades embodied the sort of ideal Japanese male (stoic, self-sacrificing, unstoppable in a ...
How much will they miss you when you’re gone? Directors typically keep putting off the answer to that question as long as possible, working until they drop. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, whose 2008 dysfunctional family drama “Tokyo Sonata” won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain ...
High schools are mercilessly hierarchical societies. At mine in rural Pennsylvania varsity basketball players occupied the summit. (Football players didn’t because we didn’t have a football team.) For a mere honor student to absent-mindedly sit in the “reserved” seat of one of these titans ...
Caring too much can be an occupational hazard for journalists in disaster or war zones. The mantra of big media is objectivity, not advocacy. Also, the media spotlight keeps shifting, while victims are still suffering. You either move with it — or get left ...
Making a documentary on a crusading 90-year-old photojournalist who is famously fearless and uncompromising is not for the timid. Saburo Hasegawa, who has been directing television documentaries on a range of social issues since the 1990s, was initially afraid that his subject, Kikujiro Fukushima, ...
ONE MARINE’S WAR: A Combat Interpreter’s Quest for Humanity in the Pacific, by Gerald A. Meehl. Naval Institute Press, 2012, 246 pp., $34.95 (hardcover) Of war memoirs there is no end, though soldiers of any given war eventually fade away. Also, their memories of ...
