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.
Yoshio Hachiro’s stint as the Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry in the new Yoshihiko Noda administration was not the briefest cabinet assignment on record, but it was certainly one of the most controversial. News outlets reported that it was “public outrage” over two ...
On Aug. 20, police arrested voice actress Shizuka Suzuike at her home in Suginami Ward, Tokyo, on suspicion of causing injuries that led to the death of 3-year-old Miyuki Watanabe in August 2010. At the time of her death, Miyuki had been in Suzuike’s ...
Sometimes the components of a news story fit together so perfectly that you can’t help but wonder how much of it was engineered by the press. Actress Hisako Manda, a former beauty queen who found success in recent years as a cover girl for ...
If you asked anyone in the world with access to any sort of media what last week’s big news story was, they would probably say Libya. If you asked the same question of similarly connected people in Japan, they would probably say the retirement ...
On July 23, actor Sosuke Takaoka tweeted that he was sick of all the Korean dramas on Fuji TV, a network he “used to be indebted to,” and demanded more “traditional” Japanese programming. “If anything related to South Korea is on,” he continued, “I ...
In May, 24-year-old TV personality Miyu Uehara was pronounced dead shortly after a friend found her hanging from a door in her Tokyo apartment. Uehara’s death was called an “apparent suicide” by the media, and while the terminology was cautious the reporting itself took ...
The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s energy agency recently contracted with an outside advertising company to monitor “inaccurate” online information regarding nuclear energy. In response, the media cried “censorship,” but as pointed out in last week’s issue of Aera, the agency has employed ...
In 1946, Japan was in ruins. The housing shortage was severe and inflation was high, so the government issued a directive to freeze rental fees. To make up for the perceived loss of income, property owners came up with supplemental fees — renewal fees, ...
The national women’s soccer team that just won the FIFA World Cup in Germany is called Nadeshiko Japan. “Nadeshiko” is the name of a flower, but it also represents a certain ideal of Japanese femininity that’s demure, quiet and accommodating to men; or, at ...
Sony recently announced it would discontinue production of the MiniDisc Walkman in September. It was just over a year ago that the company dropped the cassette Walkman, so within the space of 18 months two media will have bitten the dust. Though audiophiles may ...
