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 ...
Not many would remember the name Norris Poulson. I was 15 when first secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev made his historic visit to the United States in September 1959. There was little love lost then between the two ...
“How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” is a satirical book by American writer Shepherd Mead that was a huge best-seller in 1952 before being made into a musical that premiered on Broadway nine years later. It tells the story of J. Pierrepont ...
There is no doubt about it: We humans are, at best, a peculiar species. It seems that we feel obliged to display brazen hostility toward each other, to the point of engaging in violence, before we can reconcile to friendship. This was brought home ...
Thank god for all things virtual. If it weren’t for the miracle of the Internet, I confess that I would never have stumbled upon a site — no, a sight! — that inspires and enlightens in equal measure. Their motto is “Prepare to believe,” ...
The renowned Polish-born film and television director and screenwriter Agnieszka Holland has created a stunning work about life and death in the Lviv ghetto during the closing months of World War II. Her film, titled “In Darkness,” stands as a metaphor of hope for ...
There is an old Soviet-era Russian joke about two rival groups of archeologists who cannot agree on the age of a mummy discovered in Central Asia. At their wits’ end, they call in the NKVD — the name of the dreaded KGB in Stalin’s ...
Aug. 30 marked the day, 28 years ago, that Japan and the world lost a writer of immense importance. Sawako Ariyoshi’s works of fiction and nonfiction took up many social issues that came into prominence in the years after her death. To my mind, ...
No two calamities are alike, yet the needs of victims vary only in scale, not in kind. This is what occurred to me as I read Itoko Kitahara’s fascinating book, “Kanto Daishinsai no Shakaishi” (The Social History of the Great Kanto Earthquake), published last ...
In the West they hover and swoop. In Japan they stalk and are known to strike. We all have them and some of us have been them. And in recent years the media, both social and antisocial, have put them under the magnifying glass ...
He is a much maligned creature at home and abroad. Some call him good for nothing; others say he is good for only one thing: bringing home the bacon … and, in recent years, a most lean bacon it has become. On the weekends ...
