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 ...
“Japan is so small: What’s the hurry?” This catchphrase, from a road-safety campaign in 1973, was created to help Japanese people slow down. In those days it was common to see drivers racing up to lights, people sprinting through a station to catch a ...
It’s a long time now since my first visit to Uluru, the stupendous sandstone formation in Australia’s Red Center that European settlers called Ayers Rock, but which has now officially reverted to the name by which it was always known to the Pitjantjatjara Aboriginal ...
On Feb. 21, 1996, Akiko Koyama, the actress wife of renowned film director Nagisa Oshima, received a phone call at her home in Kugenuma Kaigan, Kanagawa Prefecture. It was from an official at the Japanese Embassy in London. “Is this the home of director ...
“Love … casts itself on persons who, apart from the sexual relation, would be hateful, contemptible, and even abhorrent to the lover. … It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly.” ...
When he published his brilliant cartoon in the Washington Post on Dec. 12, 1961, American cartoonist Herblock, may, oddly enough, just as well have been addressing one of the primary concerns of today’s political debate in the United States. In that cartoon, arch-conservative Republican ...
The greatest public health issue facing the people of Japan today is not cancer. It is not vascular diseases than can cause heart attacks and strokes. It is not the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease in the ever-rising number of the elderly. It is depression ...
Last week in Counterpoint I wrote about the three deep gaps crisscrossing this country, turning it into a kakusa shakai (society of disparities). These rifts, amply recognized today among the populace and in the media, are: the income, or wealth, gap; the goal gap; ...
This is a nation of gaps. When the term kakusa shakai came into vogue in 2006 — a fairly self-explanatory expression given that kakusa means “gap” or “disparity,” and shakai means “society” — it was a clear sign of Japanese people having finally recognized ...
What is it that has aided the people of Tohoku in coping with the tragedy inflicted on that region of northeast Honshu by the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011? The entire world marveled at their resilience, courage and stoic altruism. Over the ...
How can Japan extricate itself from the morass it sank into two decades ago when its asset-inflated bubble burst? This is the question on nearly everyone’s mind in this country today. One thing is for sure: You can’t get out of quicksand by pulling ...
