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 ...
When she looked at the floor plans for Oxford’s redesigned Ashmolean Museum and saw that her two Japanese galleries formed an L-shape in one corner of the building, curator Clare Pollard didn’t see an awkward space. “I saw a tea-house,” she explains. And there ...
LONDON — They are, according to their kanji, part earth and part spirit, somewhere between animal and human. They are dogu, the most remarkable products of Japan’s Jomon Period, a Neolithic era before the advent of rice cultivation, when the Japanese archipelago supported higher ...
Easter Island has been many things in the three centuries it has been known to the West: mooted landing site of UFOs; exotic long-haul holiday destination; and favorite location of the Discovery Channel — to name just a few. “Collapse: How Societies Choose to ...
At midday on March 29, 1914, a yacht named Mana, flying the British colors, dropped anchor in the tiny inlet of Cook’s Bay, Hanga Roa. On board was an anthropologist who would carry out the first systematic survey of the Easter Island statues, and ...
The earliest documented reference to rongorongo was made by a French missionary, Eugene Eyraud, who wrote in 1864 that he thought “the primitive script a custom which [the islanders] preserve without searching for the meaning.” The battered rongorongo tablets in the island’s only museum, ...
The Mayor Pedro Pablo Edmunds Paoa, or “Petero” as he is known, has been mayor of Hanga Roa, Rapa Nui’s only settlement, for 12 years, and won re-election last November. He has an open-door policy at his office on Hanga Roa’s main street, and ...
“The most wooden performances ever,” wrote one London critic of the latest Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production. “Superb!” For its new staging of Shakespeare’s epic poem “Venus and Adonis,” which tells of the seduction of the handsome youth Adonis by Venus, the hot-blooded goddess ...
LONDON — Three figures sit round a clover-shape table: a bearded and slippered Chinese sage, a periwigged European, and a Japanese aristocrat whose kimono bears his ancient family crest. The sage, arms crossed, gazes impassively into space; the samurai is cuddled up close to ...
Just 33 years old when she headed the Tokyo Bureau of the Financial Times, Gillian Tett took an unusual route to the heart of Japan’s business world. The Cambridge-educated anthropologist began freelancing for the British Broadcasting Corp. and the FT from the villages of ...
We don’t know when she was born, or when she died — was it April 9, 1812, at age 25, or perhaps Dec. 20, 1884, aged nearly 100? We don’t even know her real name, but the Shoshone woman who accompanied Lewis, Clark and ...
