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 ...
“I think I can create a farming environment that can give hope to Fukushima farmers.” These are the words of Takemi Shirado, the driving force behind a unique enterprise. With its headquarters in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, less than 50 km from the stricken reactors ...
Back in 1991, I was offered a tenured position at a university in Kyoto. Needless to say, this was a big step for me and my family, who were all looking forward to settling into Kyoto life. I went to the home of the ...
Confrontational, outspoken, feisty and highly focused, Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto is a self-made man determined to redraw the loci of power in Japan. He is clearly using the local platform from which to spring into the national arena. The question on everyone’s mind is: ...
First of two parts Can Toru Hashimoto — the controversial and complex, outspoken and aggressive 43-year-old mayor of Osaka — ever be the prime minister of Japan? This week and next, in an attempt to answer that question, Counterpoint will put the photogenic Hashimoto’s ...
Many years ago I coined a phrase — “Frozen Gaijin” — to describe a particular kind of foreigner living in Japan. A frozen gaijin can be recognized in an instant. The longer frozen gaijin stay in Japan, the rosier everything in their native country ...
“Keeping silent after Fukushima is barbaric,” is how composer and musician Ryuichi Sakamoto recently made clear his proactive stance toward Japan’s ongoing nuclear disaster. With a stinging article in the June 15 edition of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, he has set out his opinions ...
If you compare the treatment dealt out in the immediate postwar period to Japanese writers who supported their nation’s military aggression in World War II with that meted out to such writers in Europe, the Japanese literary collaborators seem to have got off lightly. ...
In November 1980, a murder in Kanagawa Prefecture just south of Tokyo stunned the nation. It involved a 20-year-old student who beat his parents to death with a metal baseball bat. Books and televised dramas followed in an attempt to comprehend the crime or ...
Last month, two members of the U.S. Senate vilified Eduardo Saverin, the cofounder of Facebook Inc., for doing something that Americans are apparently coming to consider a punishable sin. Sen. Charles Schumer, along with three cosponsors, has introduced a bill in the Senate to ...
You gotta hand it to the Americans. By god, they invented or at least morphed into profitability just about everything that’s on my desk as I write this: my landline telephone; my iPad, which is open to my Facebook page; a DVD of the ...
