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 ...
The automaker General Motors filed for bankruptcy earlier this month, and there are surely two people rejoicing in their graves at the news. One of them is John DeLorean. The other is Clement Attlee. DeLorean will be known to many as the maverick car ...
Who are the people that are suffering the most as this global depression unfolds? Clearly, it is the weakest members of society who are getting the worst deal. That, sadly, is the way it has always worked. There’s not much that can be done ...
We used to think that SARS was the killer disease. No doubt it still is. But at least it seems dormant for the moment. In its place we now have a potentially more potent epidemic going around that looks set to engulf the whole ...
In his inaugural address as 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama said: “We remain a young nation but, in the words of the Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.” The words he quoted are from St. Paul’s First ...
Crises come and crises go, but this one seems to be in a class of its own. And now that it has arrived, it doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon. The media started out by talking about the credit crunch. Now the ...
So now we know. Aso the “manga” man cannot read Japanese. At least not when it is written in kanji. The newspapers have been full of revelations these past few weeks about Prime Minister Taro Aso’s slipups in the art of kanji deciphering. Mind ...
Since when was Halloween such a big thing in Japan? Admittedly, you could see it coming these past few years. But this autumn it is simply everywhere. Those violently orange pumpkin faces with black grins spring out at you in the most incongruous settings, ...
The accepted wisdom seems to be that Japan is being less affected than most by the ongoing banking crisis. I wouldn’t bank on it. True, for the moment we are not having it as bad as the Americans or the Europeans. Yet there is ...
When the Doha Round of trade negotiations broke down some weeks ago, no one was particularly surprised. Nor did anyone seem to care all that much. Indeed, people appeared to take the collapse of the talks as the seal of approval to go ahead ...
Does the presence of a safety net make people too reckless, lazy and dependent? Or does it allow people to experiment, develop skills in a secure environment and prevent the penalization of healthy high spirits. This could be an argument about how to run ...
