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P/CLOUDY
NTT DoCoMo Inc., despite being Japan’s biggest mobile phone carrier, has been struggling against tough smartphone competition from KDDI Corp. and Softbank Corp., which is leading in that area. But one edge that the cellphone behemoth — it has more than 60 million subscribers ...
Throughout most of Japan, June is the rainy season. While all that rainfall is great for rice paddies so that we can have delicious new harvest rice in the fall, it makes it a rather dull month for seasonal produce: The summer’s bounty of ...
If you don’t get into the ring once or twice, then you’re a coward, Geoffrey Ima says as he describes people’s attitudes toward boxing in his hometown in Uganda. Ima has been in the ring hundreds of times and came to love boxing so ...
Claude Regy says the team at the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) threw him the “best birthday party ever” when he arrived in Japan just days after the actual May 1 occasion. The 90-year-old French director is hoping for an even better birthday gift, ...
The 27-year-old defender says he was ready for a change of scenery after helping Sanfrecce Hiroshima win theJ. League title last season.
Has this ever happened to you? A friend in another country e-mails a plea for help in finding information in Japanese due to their encountering any one of several obstacles. For instance, the operating system or software on the computer they are using might ...
NINE DRAGONS, by Michael Connelly. Little, Brown and Company, 2009, 384 pp., $27.99 (hardcover) Michael Connelly’s series character, LAPD homicide detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, had a rough time as a youth. His mother, a Hollywood party girl, was murdered and he was raised in ...
While a senior at Tokyo's Sophia University, 23-year-old Missouri native Jake Adelstein was heading home from a Shinjuku cinema when, on a whim, he dropped into a game arcade and popped ¥100 into the slot of a fortunetelling robot for some mystical career advice.
Encoding and decoding may be almost as old as writing itself. This past summer I read “Treason by the Book,” a fascinating work by Yale University professor Jonathan D. Spence set in 18th-century China. It seems a scholar named Zha Siting (1664-1727) was charged ...
PAPER BUTTERFLY, by Diane Wei Liang. Simon and Schuster, 2009, 227 pages, $24.00 (hardcover) Reviewed by Mark Schreiber Mei Wang, the Beijing-based female private investigator who made her first appearance in “The Eye of Jade” (2008), is back. Burned out by the demands of ...
THE RAMEN KING AND I: How the Inventor of Instant Noodles Fixed My Love Life, by Andy Raskin. Gotham, 2009, 293 pp., $26 (hardcover) “The year I was a student at International Christian University . . . Japan’s automated-teller machines were open only during ...
In an article last May 10 introducing the many attractions of Tokyo’s neighbor Kawasaki, this writer made a brief reference to the Nihon Minkaen (The Japan Open-Air Folk House Museum) in Tama Ward. This sprawling outdoor facility, operated by the city of Kawasaki, features ...
In an article last May 10 introducing the many attractions of Tokyo’s neighbor Kawasaki, this writer made a brief reference to the Nihon Minkaen (The Japan Open-Air Folk House Museum) in Tama Ward. This sprawling outdoor facility, operated by the city of Kawasaki, features ...
GONE TOMORROW by Lee Child. New York: Delacorte Press, 2009, 422 pp., $27 (cloth) John Rambo, Harry Bosch, Elvis Cole’s partner Joe Pike and other veterans of the Vietnam War era — who have served hard-boiled fiction so well over the past three decades ...
Whenever I watch national broadcaster NHK’s weather forecast, I feel consoled that no matter how hot it may get in July and August in Tokyo, the mercury in Utsunomiya is always going to be several degrees higher. So this city of 500,000 that’s 100 ...
“The number of people learning Japanese has increased and is currently estimated to be more than 3 million worldwide,” says Nobuyuki Suzuki, deputy manager of a very special store in Tokyo. “Four years ago, 350,000 people took the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT),” he adds. ...
MEDUSA by Clive Cussler. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2009, 454 pp., $27.95 (cloth) This 454-page thriller, written in the time frame between the outbreak of SARS and swine influenza, puts a new twist on biological warfare. Indeed, what if an insidious crime syndicate ...