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 ...
Maybe the abundance of “safe” fashion on the runways at the 2010 Autumn/Winter Japan Fashion Week in Tokyo last month was the designers’ way of spinning themselves a taffeta and jersey-cotton cocoon from which they hope to emerge next season with their businesses and ...
Japan Fashion Week made it to its 10th birthday in Tokyo Midtown just recently with a lineup stronger than ever — though its growth from here on may be stunted due to a looming budget crisis and failure to ride on the rolling wave ...
Coming back in style After an absence of nearly 20 years, the godfather of Japanese fashion, Yohji Yamamoto, returned to Tokyo for a well-deserved hero’s welcome. Yamamoto, who arguably has been one of the biggest style influences in Japan and abroad since making his ...
Topshop stays on top When Topshop, the London-based clothing chain, first landed on Japan’s shores, its affordable and trendy range of clothing was a massive boon for Tokyo’s young and hip. Fast-forward four years, and though the Harajuku store still draws its fans, the ...
24 Issey Miyake The bread-and-butter creations of many of today’s high-end brands are their lower-priced, low-end lines and collaborations, which have been rolling out in spades since the recession dropped its bomb on fashion (take a look at Comme des Garcons’ Black and Jimmy ...
The luxury of fashion The “Luxury in Fashion Reconsidered” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MoT) is a small but admirable attempt to illustrate how luxury has been defined through clothing from the 17th century to today. On show are grandiose pieces ...
Back to black Black can be dreary, dark and damning, but in the case of Comme des Garcons’ new line titled “Black,” it is delightful and . . . discounted. Black is a lower-priced range that features perennially popular Comme des Garcons styles in ...
With Japan Fashion Week shows now running concurrently with the Tokyo International Film Festival, it was hard sometimes not to liken the collections to films. Theatre Products had “A Passage to India” theme in its collection of traditional Indian embroidery and linen fused with ...
For six flurried days from Oct. 19, Tokyo’s ritzy Midtown complex area hosted a flock of excited fashionistas for the ninth biannual Japan Fashion Week. But this time around, the designers, models and critics must have been feeling some opening-night jitters after a tumultuous ...
Two hours late to the audition, a leggy model scrambled in to Matohu’s showroom. After she presented her portfolio of photos to the designers and performed a short runway strut, she picked up her things, gave a bow and quickly left. One week before ...
