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.
In retrospect, I didn’t really need a new baseball cap. But this one, advertised by the publisher of a nationally circulated magazine, had a humorous logo in Japanese that tickled my fancy, making it — like much of the merchandise sold via mail order ...
On Dec. 3, BBC News reported that the prices of petroleum on both sides of the Atlantic hit their highest levels since the financial crisis, with Goldman Sachs forecasting an increase to $100 per barrel in 2011. This ominous news item seems to have ...
ROCK PAPER TIGER, by Lisa Brackman. Soho Press, 2010, 368 pp., $24.99 (hardcover) CURE, by Robin Cook. Putnam, 2010, 396 pp., $26.95 (hardcover) Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 film “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” in which James Stewart finds himself involved in an assassination plot ...
For the last three decades, air travelers on the Tokyo-Taipei route have utilized Narita International Airport and Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport. But with restoration from last month of international flights between Tokyo’s Haneda Airport and Taipei’s dilapidated Songshan Airport, round-trip travelers will shave four ...
The most recent territorial dispute over the Senkaku (Japanese name)/Diaoyutai (Chinese name) Islands, located southwest of Okinawa (or north of Taiwan if you prefer), was triggered on Sept. 7 when a Chinese trawler attempted to ram two Japanese Coast Guard vessels. The blurry details ...
While I was managing a gift shop at Expo ’70 in Osaka, a friend arranged the loan of a Daihatsu Hijet mini pickup. It was probably a mid-1960s model, so small that the only way I could squeeze into the cab was to remove ...
THE MASUDA AFFAIR, by I.J. Parker. Severn House, 2010, 294 pp., $28.95 (hardcover) BLOOD HINA: A Mas Arai Mystery, by Naomi Hirahara. Minotaur Books, 2010, $24.99 (hardcover) While traveling alone on horseback through a gloomy forest near Lake Biwa, northeast of Kyoto, Justice Ministry ...
“Balloon bombs aimed at North America were released by the thousands,” says Meiji University professor Akira Yamada, running his hand in an up-and-down motion across a diagram of the Pacific Ocean. He first points to the spots on the coast of Honshu from where ...
On Saturday, Oct. 2, over 2,670 demonstrators carrying Hinomaru Japanese flags marched in Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park to protest the Kan government’s soft handling of a long-running territorial dispute with China over the Senkaku Islands (known in Chinese as Diaoyutai), which was rekindled on Sept. ...
THE MAN WITH THE BALTIC STARE, by James Church. Minotaur, 2010, 288 pp., $24.99 (hardcover) LOVE SONGS FROM A SHALLOW GRAVE, by Colin Cotterill. SOHO Crime, 2010, 326 pp., $25 (hardcover) International news agencies that pride themselves on their astute investigative journalism regularly admit ...
