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 ...
EFSF stands for European Financial Stability Facility. Or so they say. I can only see it as standing for European Financial Science Fiction. How can it be anything else given the nature of the arrangement? EFSF is basically a scheme whereby euro-area governments get ...
So yet another Japanese prime minister comes out of the woodwork. One gets so tired of talking about revolving doors, merry-go-rounds, musical chairs and passing the parcel. In fairness, Yoshihiko Noda is a lot less objectionable than some of the other revolving persons we ...
Public finances are melting down in Europe, in America and of course Japan. The situation is going nuclear, left, right and center. It’s not so much China Syndrome as it is Global Syndrome. Operators manning those fiscal reactors ought to have vented their radioactive ...
Images of “The Treachery of Images,” the painting by the Belgian artist Rene Magritte, who wrote “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”) under his his impeccable portrait of a smoking pipe, keeps flashing off and on in my mind as ...
“Sheer futility,” Quoheleth says. “Sheer futility: Everything is futile!” As “son of David, king in Jerusalem” in the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament, Quoheleth could well have been talking about the state of politics in 21st century Japan instead of the state ...
Recent news of the restaurant chain Yakiniku-zakaya Ebisu serving contaminated raw beef to its customers makes me think of an old Japanese proverb. It tells us that “poverty breeds stupidity.” All old proverbs are invariably wise. They also tend to be true most of ...
Only one or lonely one. This may be the question that nations start asking themselves in the aftermath of Japan’s threefold disaster. Global supply chains are being disrupted in very serious ways because of Japan’s increasingly critical inability to deliver the parts, materials and ...
A week after the earthquake and we are still living with the aftershocks, and in more ways than one. While the earth still shakes under us now and again, shakes of a different kind also keep coming: nuclear power plant failures, radioactive contamination fears, ...
T he credit rating company Standard & Poor’s downgraded Japanese sovereign debt late last month. With an AA- rating, we are now a notch below Spain, whose possibly looming debt crisis has been unnerving EU financial authorities for some time. Remarks on the part ...
Watching the dollar’s recent plight in the foreign-exchange markets, I am reminded of a fascinating story I came across some years ago in an anthology of supernatural tales called “The Bottle Imp.” It has its origins in German folklore and goes something like this: ...
