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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 ...
“The destiny of a nation depends on the manner in which it feeds itself,” wrote French epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) in his famous treatise, “The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy.” If Brillat-Savarin were living today, one wonders what he might say ...
Japan may be in the midst of a silent epidemic of kinketsu-byo (“lack of money disease”). The source of the infection is a new statute that bans many borrowers from obtaining unsecured loans. While the full repercussions of the revised Money Lending Business Law ...
THE MALACCA CONSPIRACY, by Don Brown. Zondervan, 2010, 352 pp., $14.99 (paper) AT THE SHARPE END, by Hugh Ashton. j-views, 2010, 408 pp., $15.99 (paper) While such enduring bad guys as Nazis, KGB agents, Cosa Nostra gangsters, sinister Asiatics and the occasional vampire still ...
“Created in response to deep popular needs, the legendary hero survives long after his death. . . . While the positive aspects of the hero’s life and character come to be emphasized (or even created out of whole cloth), less attractive features are passed ...
With the exception of Hokkaido, Japan heralds the arrival of summer when the 気象庁 (Kishocho, or Japan Meteorological Agency) declares 梅雨明け (tsuyu ake, end of the rainy season). This is the time of the year when urban office workers head for a nearby 屋上ビアガーデン ...
Differences in familiarity with computers are creating ever-wider gaps within the ranks of Japan’s salarymen. Evening tabloid Nikkan Gendai (July 17) reports on the emergence of a new type of person at companies who never stops typing on his PC, even while being spoken ...
Snakes Can’t Run, by Ed Lin. Minotaur Books, 2010, 288 pp., $24.99 (hardcover) City of Dragons, by Kelli Stanley. Minotaur Books, 2010, 338 pp., $24.99 (hardcover) Two years back I reviewed “Year of the Dog,” about the exploits of detective Jack Yu, the creation ...
When the Democratic Party of Japan indicated in its political manifesto that it favored voting rights for foreign permanent residents, the reaction from some quarters of the media was visceral. In early April, publisher Takarajima-sha produced a 96-page “emergency publication” titled “Gaikokujin Sanseiken de ...
Hello Kitty Must Die, by Angela S. Choi. Tyrus Books, 2010, 250 pages, $14.95 (paper) “I love Cantonese,” proclaims Fiona Yu. “I can express myself at a whole new level of crudeness and vulgarity that I can’t with English.” Managing nonetheless with English profanity ...
On a trans-Pacific flight to Narita several months ago, I struck up a conversation with a passenger who was upbeat about living in Japan. After six months, he told me with a self-satisfied grin, he had “just about got all the hiragana down pat.” ...
The media has been filled with revelations of ties between professional sumo and organized crime. Since late May, the tabloids and gossipy “wide shows” on TV have made a huge flap over Sehei Kimura and one other stable master for allowing senior gang members ...
It’s been many years since I’ve heard anyone remark to me,「日本語がお上手ですね」(“Nihongo ga ojōzu desu ne,” “Your Japanese is good”). It took me a while to realize that such a remark was probably never really intended as a compliment in the first place. Rather, it ...