AP A car bomb exploded outside a mosque Sunday, killing at least 37 people and wounding another 141 in a mostly Shiite Muslim neighborhood in the southern Pakistan city of Karachi — the third mass-casualty attack on the minority sect in the country this ...
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 ...
Just how cute are giant pandas? The public can’t get enough of them. The star attractions at Ueno Zoo in Tokyo are Ri Ri and Shin Shin, a male and female pair who helped attract some 4.4 million visitors last fiscal year — the ...
When Japanese people are ordering food, how many times do you hear them asking for “oomori” (large size)? It’s the equivalent of asking for “supersize” in a U.S. fast-food joint. My guess is that it is only relatively recently, over the last 20 years ...
I once took a ferry from Kagoshima on the southernmost tip of Kyushu to Amami Oshima, halfway to Okinawa. Just 60 km out from the massive Sakurajima volcano that dominates Kagoshima City, our ship passed a huge granite hunk of rock some 50,000 hectares, ...
To start the year, here’s an appreciation of a site in Japan that would have left even the Zen-imbued architects of Kyoto’s sublime Kinkaku-ji (Temple of the Golden Pavilion) open-mouthed with awe. Not only that, but it’s a site where basic questions about the ...
Visitors to Japan often comment on the way taxi doors open as you approach — at the touch of a button by the driver; and that those drivers generally wear smart white gloves. I apologize for the competitive tone, but there is something far ...
There is a wonderful expression in Japanese: Fūdo ni nareru, which means something like “to become acclimatized to natural conditions.” The kanji characters making up “fūdo” are fū (wind) and do (earth), and the expression tends to refer to how Japan’s natural conditions — ...
“It makes good media. It’s the emotional pulling on the idea that radiation kills you. But you talk to our cancer patients: Radiation cures you.” The nuclear expert sitting in front of me was dismissive about the fears surrounding the public’s perception of radiation. ...
You may have seen the YouTube footage of an orangutan cooling her face with a wet towel. Filmed on a sweltering day in August at Tama Zoological Park in Tokyo, the ape is seen dipping a towel in a pond, wringing it out, and ...
Last week I watched “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” a new film about superintelligent chimps that bust out of captivity and rampage across San Francisco in a bid for freedom. After that — of which more in a moment — I came ...
I’m in a lab surrounded by computer and video equipment, toys, and robots. Lots of robots. I’m like a kid in a candy shop. It’s the modern equivalent of an Aladdin’s cave for otaku (geeks). Some of the robots I even recognize. There’s the ...
