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.
However one feels about the death penalty, it’s difficult to argue that its application in Japan isn’t arbitrary. Last week, former Justice Minister Hideo Hiraoka publicly denounced his successor Toshio Ogawa’s decision to have three death row inmates hanged on March 29, saying that ...
When it comes to public relations, the Japanese government tends toward imprecision. Many say the Japanese language is already built for vagueness, but that doesn’t mean Japanese people can’t see through the haze. In the last few weeks, trade minister Yukio Edano’s attempts to ...
Following Atsuko Maeda’s March 25 announcement that she was leaving the all-girl idol collective AKB48, a rumor circulated on Twitter that a male University of Tokyo student had committed suicide in response. The rumor was quickly exposed as a hoax, but the point had ...
A bill to increase the consumption tax has finally been submitted to the Diet. Approval is by no means assured, owing partly to the fact that the substance of the issue has changed since the idea of a consumption tax was originally formulated. The ...
The neighborhood of Minami Senju in Tokyo’s Arakawa Ward is serviced by three train lines that provide easy, quick access to all parts of the city and beyond. East of these lines is an area called Shioiri, highlighted by a relatively new urban development ...
On March 15, the Asahi Shimbun reported that the Yomiuri Giants baseball team paid huge amounts of money in contract-signing bonuses to several rookies, in violation of an agreement signed by all 12 Japan Professional Baseball teams. The payouts took place from 1997 to ...
Last week, NHK aired all 22 episodes of the second season of “Glee” over seven consecutive nights. “Glee” is an American TV series centered on a high school glee club whose members are considered outcasts because of their love of singing. One member is ...
As the government continues to push for an increase in the consumption tax, a question related to last year’s disaster is still being debated: How much of the burden for rebuilding should be shouldered by taxpayers? We live in a resolutely capitalist country that ...
Ambition can sometimes be measured by the amount of deference paid to the established order, so the recently published book “Genpatsu Kiki to Todai Waho,” which irreverently analyzes the “parlance of the University of Tokyo” as it was utilized during the early days of ...
This Sunday is the first anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the coastline of northeastern Japan and killed more than 15,000 people. In January, the central government announced that it would hold a memorial service on March 11 at the National Theater, ...
