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 ...
Conspiracy or cock-up? That is the question that invariably comes to mind when something goes very badly wrong in business or politics. As it has done in both of these two worlds in Japan lately. First came the Democratic Party of Japan’s miserable defeat ...
The Bible tells us that “those who sow in tears sing as they reap” (Psalm 126). This was true for the Jews as they returned to Jerusalem after their prolonged exile in Babylonia. However, more recent history has shown us that there can be ...
The old are invariably critical of the young. Japan is no exception. The older generation finds much to bemoan in the attitudes and behaviors of their successors. One of the many complaints lodged against the younger generation in Japan is that they lack the ...
I don’t like to say I told you so, but I told you so. Back in July last year, I wrote in this column that the post-Lehman shock world was participating in a drama in five acts, in which the fourth was likely to ...
Saint Thomas More is the patron saint of politicians. As a Catholic myself I should have known this before, but the information actually came to me quite recently via the Mainichi Shimbun. So many thanks to the newspaper for this piece of religious education. ...
The movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Arthur C. Clarke’s epoch-making science fiction masterpiece, was first published in 1968. Its sequel “2010: Odyssey Two” came out in 1982. To put “2010″ more precisely in its place, it was actually the first sequel among three. The ...
A newspaper headline tells me ‘Pace of growth picks up in Japan.” The actual figures bear out the statement. Japan’s real GDP registered a quarter-on-quarter increase of 1.2 percent in the July-September quarter. The Japanese economy is expanding. But is it? Take a look ...
I have triangles on the mind lately. I used to think that economic activity was a triangle with growth, competition and distribution making up its three sides. The perfect triangle is equilateral. That is to say, its three sides are identical in length. It ...
Politics is not the kind of stuff you normally stay up to watch on the telly long into the night. Not unless scandals, drunkenness and other juicy activities are involved, of course. But on Wednesday night, things were just a little bit different. On ...
“All the world’s a stage.” So says the Bard, and who are we to argue? The global economy is certainly not short on drama these days. In fact, it feels very much as though we are living through a play in five acts, the ...
