What is behind the miserable social status of women in Japan? In October last year, the World Economic Forum, a prestigious independent organization based in Geneva, published a report on the gender gap in countries around the world. Japan’s overall ranking was 101, the ...

Beate Sirota Gordon passed away on Dec. 30. She was 89. In 1946, when Article 24 of the Japanese Constitution was being written — and finding herself to be “the only woman in the room,” as she put it with inveterate modesty in her ...

Way back in the heady 1960s, Japan was one big Cathedral of Optimism, and I found myself among a people who believed their country was finally on that road laid out before them in the post-feudal Meiji Era (1868-1912) to “catch up with and ...

Ryotaro Shiba, the great author of historical novels, was a student of Mongolian at Osaka University of Foreign Languages when, at the end of 1943, he was drafted into the army. Then aged 20, he received a “provisional graduation qualification” (the actual certificate was ...

If you remember the Pinto, dear reader, then you may be as old as the hills — or at least as old as I am. No, I am not referring to the horse that the Cisco Kid rode, a feisty pinto named Diablo. I’m ...

This is the 15th general election I have witnessed since coming to live in Japan in 1967, and by any standards it is the most crucial one of those for this country. Only once before have I regarded an upcoming general election in the ...

There are approximately 7,000 exhibits in Kiev’s Ukrainian National Chornobyl Museum. (The location of the nuclear plant that exploded on April 26, 1986 is spelled this way in Ukrainian.) Among the documents, photographs, maps and objects at this museum that opened on the sixth ...

Dried Anpo persimmons from Fukushima Prefecture are famed for staying fresh and juicy. However, for the second successive autumn, 90 percent of the crop has had to be discarded due to it registering radioactive contamination levels above legally set limits. Mushrooms, a staple of ...

Boy meets girl. They fall in love. What happens after that … well, it depends on the individuals, the mores of their generation and the availability of a few square meters of private space. Back in 1968, a year after I arrived in Japan, ...

Australians have always been uncomfortable with their nation’s geography. Ever since Europeans invaded and began to colonize the Antipodean continent in the second half of the 18th century, settlers — whether there of their own accord or sent by force as convicts — have ...

“My mother having dementia turned into a chance for us to relate to each other again and even have fun in each other’s company.” That’s what film director Yuka Sekiguchi came to realize when she returned to Japan in 2009, after 29 years in ...

Futaro Gamagori was born into a destitute household. His father was a no-good womanizing lush; his mother, unable to afford medical care, died of illness. The young Futaro sets out on a life of serious crime — thieving, raping, murdering. He eventually becomes the ...