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.
One boast you’ll never hear from me is that I have a good head for numbers. I’m all right up to two figures beyond a decimal point — I know that 3.14 approximates to the 円周率 (enshūritsu, Pi, i.e., the ratio of a circle’s ...
KAIKI: Uncanny Tales from Japan, Volume 2: Country Delights. Kurodahan Press, 2010, 286 pp., $16 (paper) Kaiki, according to my Japanese-English dictionary, means “grotesque; bizarre; mysterious; strange.” And since August is the traditional time in Japan for telling hair-raising tales, this anthology — the ...
Following the July 23 collision of two high-speed trains in Wenzhou City, Zhejiang Province — blamed on faulty signaling equipment — that killed at least 39 passengers and injured over 200, Japan’s media, to their credit, suppressed any obvious overtones of shadenfreude. But in ...
Within a couple of weeks of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, major magazine publishers and newspapers were already putting out extra editions covering the disaster. The first were mostly A4-size on glossy paper, which made them easy to display in the magazine racks ...
LARRY BOND’S RED DRAGON RISING: Edge of War, by Larry Bond and Jim DeFelice. Forge, 2010, 380 pp., $25 (hardcover) Future war fiction is mostly fantasy, and fortunately such stories seldom come true. But some do. One example was a book titled “Banzai!” Published ...
Back in the early 1970s, electronic signposts in Tokyo and other major cities used to display levels of carbon dioxide and other air pollutants along with the temperature. Now in addition to the weather, the media post radiation levels, and people have been scratching ...
Many of Japan’s admired historic figures were adulated for being “warrior scholars,” since they were equally adept at leading armies and composing poems. This ideal is referred to as 文武両道 (bunbu ryodō). Bun refers to writing and by extension the literary arts. Bu relates ...
In the first week of June, media attention shifted briefly from the Fukushima reactor calamity to skirmishes on the floor of the National Diet, where the government headed by Prime Minister Naoto Kan survived a no-confidence vote. But the Fukushima reactor troubles keep coming ...
THE DREAM OF LAFCADIO HEARN, by Roger Pulvers. Kurodahan Press, 2011, 189 pp., $14 (paper) “Japan,” asserts the fictitious character Lafcadio Hearn on page 97, “has chaos at its core. The closer one approaches that core, the deeper one fathoms the world of illusion ...
News reports immediately following the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear plant accident of panicked foreign residents lining up for the first flight home — in many cases advised to flee by their own governments — had the initial result of helping to feed ...
