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 ...
The destruction wrought by the Great East Japan Earthquake has started to appear in statistics in its full force. New car sales in April fell 47.3 percent from a year ago to 185,673 units, while gross domestic product for the January-March quarter contracted 0.9 ...
More than three weeks after Tohoku and the eastern parts of the Kanto region were hit by a massive earthquake that triggered a tsunami and a nuclear power plant crisis — there are few indications of when Japan might get the situation under control. ...
This year’s annual “shunto” labor-management wage talks appear to be proceeding on a subdued note. There can be three major reasons why. One is that Japan’s official unemployment rate has topped 5 percent for three years in a row. This is still much lower ...
The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum’s high-level meeting on growth strategy in Beppu, Oita Prefecture, wrapped up with a chairman’s statement on actions to be taken by 2015. That strategy is to be formally adopted at the APEC summit in November, with revisions due by ...
The G8 and G20 meetings in Toronto, closely watched last month as Europe struggled to halt the chain reaction of doubt set in motion by the Greek debt crisis, exposed their inability to coordinate on quelling financial uncertainty. The problems in the European Union ...
The storm that is the Greek debt problem continues to rage through the global markets. In an emergency meeting May 2, the finance ministers of the European Union agreed to work with the International Monetary Fund to provide 110 billion euro in loans to ...
Share prices are picking up worldwide amid a growing sense that the global economy has finally hit bottom. However, we see no big change in the conservative ways Japanese households are managing their assets, which are mainly savings accounts. The recent jumps in share ...
The Japanese economy posted growth in the last quarter, but I would like to make a few observations about the components of the growth. The revised figures for gross domestic product in October-December 2009, announced on March 11, showed that economic activity grew 0.9 ...
The euro’s value is falling conspicuously. Compared with the highs in the last quarter of 2009, Europe’s unified currency has dropped from around ¥135 to ¥122, and from about $1.52 to roughly $1.37, losing nearly 10 percent against the yen and the dollar. What ...
With one real estate megaproject after another, including an man-made resort island shaped like a coconut tree and the world’s tallest skyscraper, Dubai has been aiming to turn the tiny emirate into the financial center of the Middle East. On Nov. 25, the state-run ...
