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Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto aims to retract his remark that U.S. servicemen in Okinawa should use its adult entertainment industry to avoid committing sex offenses.
Kan Yasuda's art somehow draws in the landscape, and entices in people, so that it is natural to explore the view through his structures and keyholes, to sit awhile atop a sculpture or to pose within their frames.
If you don’t get into the ring once or twice, then you’re a coward, Geoffrey Ima says as he describes people’s attitudes toward boxing in his hometown in Uganda. Ima has been in the ring hundreds of times and came to love boxing so ...
It may seem perverse to express nostalgia for a category of mental illness, but many sufferers, as well as some psychiatrists, regret the passing of “manic depression.”
Getting slapped by a a coach has always been, as far as I could see, simply another aspect of sports training in Japan.
“In a bad year, it is not only the plows that break, but the hearts too.” — Pira Sudham, “People of Isan” The recorded history of Laos begins with the reign of the 14th-century Fa Ngum, a former exile at the Khmer court who ...
If you can accept its gimmickry and brazen commercialism, the glitzy, neon-lit hot spring resort of Beppu, a melange of pachinko parlors, love hotels, sleazy bars, night clubs and hot baths visited by over 12 million tourists a year, constitutes an amazing thermal and ...
LAOS: Culture and Society, edited by Grant Evans. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2000, 313 pp., $24.95 The colorful volumes of anthropology produced in the past by gifted amateurs, lady travelers of independent means, colonial officers and the like, have been replaced by the ...
As you turn into the quiet country road leading to Usuki’s Buddhist rock carvings, a stone torii gate, riveted into the earth, deeply corroded by wind and rain, comes into momentary view. Standing in a field of rippling green paddy, it is an unintentional ...
If the Yamaguchi post office were looking for an image to place on a commemorative stamp of their prefectural capital, they would probably choose the city’s magisterial five-story pagoda, built on the grounds of the Ruriko Temple. Made from Japanese cypress, the pagoda is ...
“The challenge is to myself and not to the mountain.” — “Clouds from Both Sides,” by Julie Tullis Alexandra David-Neel, the author of several books on Tibetan mysticism and a traveler in Buddhist domains such as Bhutan, Korea and Japan, immersed herself in esoteric ...
Ten or 15 years ago, it seemed as if women travel writers might have become an extinct species. Manuscripts submitted by women were subjected to a special set of rules. Editors expected their accounts to include record-breaking feats, promotional gimmicks or at least the ...
While there are women who work exclusively as travel writers, many women writers, journalists and novelists among them, have chosen at one time or another to temporarily commandeer the travel vehicle to get their ideas or dreams across. The distinction between travel and other ...
CHIRAN, Kagoshima Pref. — An aerial view of the Satsuma Peninsula, glimpsed from a light, low-flying craft such as a glider, would reveal a pastoral landscape of striking warmth, with green volcanic peaks, white stucco-faced houses and time-worn hot-spring inns tucked away down leafy ...
Like the good residents of Granada in southern Andalusia, notorious for their drastic mood swings, natives of Kumamoto have a reputation for being stubborn and sulky. These durable folk (Kumamoto has one of the country’s largest contingents of centenarians) are also reputed to be ...
A tattered red lantern swings back and forth on a rusty hook outside Densuke, a small, family-run pub-restaurant on Shiokaze Street. The name of the street means salt breeze, and inside Densuke a gregarious, decidedly “salty” bunch of customers sit on sagging tatami mats ...
To the millions of Myanmar Buddhists who still visit it, Mandalay symbolizes, nominally at least, the Rome of this “Golden Land.” It is a royal “City of Gems.” The city was originally founded by King Thibaw to fulfill an ancient prophecy: Ananda, a disciple ...