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 ...
For Tai Kawabata's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
On Nov. 16, the Goethe-Institut Tokyo will host an event titled “Die Niemandsklänge” (“The Sounds of Nobody”), which will feature a symposium and a concert focusing on artistic expression in Japan following the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, and the ensuing ...
In 1873, to mark the 50th anniversary of his musical activities at a concert, Franz Liszt told people of the “Christus” oratorio: “This is my will.” The piece was one of his most important, and on March 31 an orchestra and three chorus groups ...
Inspiration from Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece “Slaughterhouse-Five” and stoic philosopher Seneca’s letters gives character to an upcoming performance in Tokyo by Izabela Chlewinska, a rising choreographer and dancer from Poland. Chlewinska was inspired by the novel’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim — a time traveler who jumps ...
Hiroko Kumagai will never forget the day in 1998 when she first stepped inside the red-brick building at the entrance to the closed and shuttered Miyahara shaft in the Miike coal mine in Omuta, Fukuoka Prefecture. “I felt I heard the voices of people ...
When the mayor of a village is told by a frog king, who is fascinated by the elegance of swans gliding in the lake, that his villagers should wear toe shoes (ballet pointe shoes) all the time, he instructs everyone between the age of ...
An article that helped Tohoku University President Akihisa Inoue win the Japan Academy Award has been retracted from a leading U.S. scientific journal after the author violated protocol by reusing his own previously published material without acknowledging it. The incident, announced Friday, amounts to ...
A former acting head of the Atomic Energy Commission called Thursday for the government to tell the public how radioactive emissions have spread from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant in the past and to predict future radiation exposure risks according to distance ...
Though much younger than the late Kazuo Ohno and the late Tatsumi Hijikata, two legends of butoh, Akira Kasai was also a pioneer of the art form in the 1960s and ’70s. He was even dubbed the “Nijinsky of butoh.” Now, a performance in ...
The 10 years following the end of World War II in Tokyo are marked by two things — war-related devastation and the march toward reconstruction. The exhibition “Tokyo Fukko” (“Reconstruction of Tokyo”) at the Edo-Tokyo Museum captures this period of Tokyo’s history through color ...
In the Japanese dance scene, all-female performing companies are common. Mademoiselle Cinema, established in 1993, is one such group. The basic concept embraced by Naoko Ito, the group’s choreographer, is “Nostalgia oriented toward the future” and her approach is to create dance by visualizing ...
