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 ...
In the 19th century, scientists finally junked the Biblical idea of a seven-day divine Creation — with man, at the pinnacle of the process, being fashioned from clay on the sixth day. Ever since, it seems, we haven’t stopped searching for our secular version ...
The French artists of the Barbizon School effectively colonized the small village of the same name in the mid-19th century; some 100 artists watched — and painted — every step taken by the few hundred peasants as they went about their daily tasks. However, ...
“In Room 101 is the worst thing in the world,” Winston Smith’s torturer told the defiant hero of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.” Now, rooms 1-4 of the Bridgestone Museum of Art’s temporary exhibition galleries are hosting a whole array of the world’s “worst ...
IWATE, Iwate Pref. — The town of Iwate, population 17,302, is one of the last places you’d expect to find an international art event. But though the largely rural Iwate Prefecture put itself on the art map 18 months ago, with the opening of ...
“My most favorite artist? The problem with that question,” says Frank Stella, settling back in his chair, “is what’s the point of it?” The frankly worshipful audience that’s gathered at the Iwate Museum of Art in Morioka City to hear New York-based artist Stella ...
Church and State have, down history, done battle for wealth and power. However, in “Holy Russia” (as that country was known in the 16th and 17th centuries), the two achieved a remarkable equilibrium. The power of the Church was seen as complementing, rather than ...
In the history of Russian icons, one image is pre-eminent as the most copied, most decorated and most adored: “Our Lady of Kazan.” The image, so legend goes, was discovered by a 10-year-old girl named Matryona in the ruins of a house in the ...
When, in 1891, Tsarevich Nicholas reached the age of 23, his father Czar Alexander III sent him on a tour of the Far East to “round out his political development,” recalled Russian politician Count Sergei Witte some years later. The Emperor Meiji was doubtless ...
First of two parts At its height, in the middle of the 19th century, the Russian Empire ruled by the Romanovs covered more than one-sixth of the surface of the globe. It was a glorious era for a dynasty that had sprung from obscure ...
“It was,” my dining companion recalls with a sigh, “a diet with just one purpose: to get you to put on weight.” Surveying his impressive frame, it’s hard not to conclude that those who catered to him had indeed been boning up on force-feeding ...
