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 ...
G. Kallupatti is a small village in the Theni District of western Tamil Nadu, tucked up against the rocky foothills of the Western Ghats in southern India. Unfortunately, the village is in a rain shadow on the eastern edge of these mountains, so precipitation ...
Last week I enjoyed the sublime luxury of watching a sunrise from the middle of a lake in Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island, Maine. At 5 a.m., while friends and family slept, I strapped a kayak to the roof of the car ...
As an American lawyer, I know a bit about working in a profession that has had serious image problems. My law-school classmates perversely enjoyed telling lawyer jokes featuring sharks and reptiles and, for a long time, when I told people my profession they responded ...
More than two months ago, BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in a ball of fire, killing 11 workers and leaving a crippled wellhead that continues to bleed millions of liters of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. If there is a silver ...
This year, 2010, is the United Nations’ International Year of Biodiversity — which is a very good thing. But why this critically important global concern gets just one year is seriously worth debating. For now, however, the easier story for the media is that ...
In “The Tempest,” William Shakespeare writes of a human body deep beneath the waves undergoing “a sea-change into something rich and strange,” transmuting into coral and pearls. The Bard’s coinage has come to mean a profound or notable transformation of any sort (now rendered ...
During the 18 years I have been writing this column, few stories have haunted me as much as that about the Japanese-owned incinerator that, for more than a decade, fumigated the U.S. Naval Air Facility at Atsugi in the Kanagawa Prefecture cities of Yamato ...
Negotiators at the COP15 conference in Copenhagen didn’t see eye to eye on much last month, but almost everyone agreed on one thing: To protect the planet we need to save its forests. From Denmark to Japan, where The Japan Times’ Nature page columnist ...
Post-conference analysis of the Copenhagen COP15 has ranged from despair and disgust to guarded optimism that 2010 will bring a new and better agreement. The truth is, Copenhagen was a circus of geopolitical bickering among self- absorbed leaders representing powerful and powerless nations, of ...
Imagine for a minute that global warming is not changing our planet’s biosphere and the ecosystems that sustain life on Earth. Imagine that climate change abetted by rising human-generated emissions of greenhouse gases does not threaten freshwater supplies, agriculture, marine ecosystems, human health, coastal ...
