Shinkansen: From Bullet Train to Symbol of Modern Japan, by Christopher P. Hood. Oxford: Routledge, 2006, 266 pp., $125 (cloth). The needle-nosed bullet train racing past the base of Mount Fuji is one of the most enduring images of Japan, a postcard mix of ...

INSPIRED SHAPES: Contemporary Designs for Japan’s Ancient Crafts, by Ori Koyama, translated by Charles Whipple, photographs by Mizuho Kuwata. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2005, 112 pp., 3,900 yen (cloth). Life in urban Japan is so suffused with artificial, factory-produced materials that the soul can cry ...

TABLOID TOKYO: 101 Tales of Sex, Crime and the Bizarre from Japan’s Wild Weeklies, by Geoff Botting, Ryann Connell, Michael Hoffman and Mark Schreiber. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2005, 255 pp., 1,400 yen (paper). Aside from the sight of middle-age Japanese businessmen happily reading comic ...

By far the most common sign along this road twisting up the Iya River in Shikoku’s remote Oboke Gorge, a spectacular chasm that is the deepest in Japan, is “under construction.” Cartoon animals smile from the many warnings about roadwork and slope reinforcement as ...

Dressed in a black tuxedo, a middle-aged former company executive took the stage, cued the six-piece band and launched into Elvis Presley’s version of the syrupy ’60s ballad “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.” Corny? Not to the hundreds of Elvis fans ...

“Someone get a saw!” yells a rescue worker frantically digging in a heap of garbage for a buried body. A blackened corpse slowly emerges, but rescuers are unsure if it is a man or woman. “I know her,” someone finally says. “It’s Mrs. Garret.” ...

On a cluttered desk in a dimly lit office in central Tokyo lies a golden, cylindrical object you can’t find in any store. It’s a combination lock that would take 3.2 trillion years to crack, about 160 times the age of the universe. “The ...