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 leather-clad guy in the line next to me had a gynecologist’s speculum hanging round his neck — and the accessories didn’t get any more normal once I was inside the Sadistic Circus, an all-night fetish event held in Roppongi’s Spiral club Nov. 23. ...
The earliest chatterbot programs ever written say more about the human condition than they do about the nature of computer intelligence. The first, ELIZA — or Dr. Eliza, as “she” was known — had the persona of a Rogerian psychotherapist. Her successor, perhaps the ...
Charles Darwin must have been a regular at whatever passed for a bar on the HMS Beagle. During the ship’s five-week stop at the Galapagos, the scientific superstar-to-be got his kicks from riding the trunk-size tortoises that give the islands their name — galapago ...
Ecuador was built on bananas. Then, in the 1970s, this tiny South American country struck oil. Forward thinkers, though, are looking to tourism to keep Ecuador’s economy afloat when the oil dries up — as it is expected to do an estimated 15 years ...
When you’re tired from trekking around Quito’s Old Town, there are plenty of distractions to be found just a short drive from the Ecuadorean capital. Here are five of the best: Otavalo With 7,000 traders, mostly Indian women from across Ecuador and neighboring Peru, ...
In 1959, to mark the centenary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species,” the Ecuadorean government declared the Galapagos a National Park. In 1979, UNESCO proclaimed the archipelago a World Heritage Site. Today, legislation introduced in 1996 restricting new settlement on ...
It doesn’t look like the face of a man who paints religious scenes. Fleshy, with that famously crumpled nose, he sports a jaunty hat and a look of shabby dandyism. In his later years — more than two decades after he engraved this 1631 ...
Many a country has enjoyed its time in the sun — a period of dominance when the world (often quite literally) seemed to be at its rulers’ feet. It’s a difficult trick to repeat, though. Italy’s Renaissance, glorious though it was, never recaptured the ...
Histor is wont to bestow epithets on its more colorful characters, from the vertically challenged King Pepin the Short (714?-768), father of Charlemagne, to Ethelred the Unready, who ruled England with singular incompetence from 978 to 1016. Few, however, have so richly deserved their ...
Celebrity is a fickle thing, as Ada Lovelace’s famous father, the poet Lord Byron, learned to his cost — sexual scandals and seesawing public opinion drove him into exile and to his death. For his daughter, however, the ups and downs of fame have ...
