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 ...
It’s not every morning that a 169-meter-long ship gets knocked over by a giant wave and lands like a beached whale virtually outside the front door of your quiet seaside home. But that’s just what happened on, of all days, Friday the 13th of ...
When Hideyuki Yoshizawa goes into the woods, he doesn’t wear the usual silver bells meant to scare off bears. He’s given up smoking, too, to eliminate that tell-tale human smell. That’s because he wants more than anything else to meet a bear in the ...
In a log cabin high on a wooded mountainside in Hiroshima Prefecture, Kazuhiko Maita, 61-year-old director of the nonprofit Institute for Asian Black Bear Research and Preservation, is puzzling over the fate of Japan’s black bears. Outside, the unpainted wood stairs are scored with ...
Just about everyone agrees that the postwar expansion of plantation forestry and the fragmentation of natural old-growth forests by roads, dams and tourist facilities play a central role in Japan’s current bear problem. The Japan Bear and Forest Association (JBFA) is one national organization ...
When Hideyuki Yoshizawa goes into the woods, he doesn’t wear the usual silver bells meant to scare off bears. He’s given up smoking, too, to eliminate that tell-tale human smell. That’s because he wants more than anything else to meet a bear in the ...
The all-electric home craze sweeping Japan with its typhoon of talking bathtubs, full-service toilets and flameless kitchens may finally have met its match. His name is Yasuyuki Fujimura, and he is the founder of Atelier Non-Electric, an inventors’ workshop in Tochigi Prefecture. Since 2000, ...
In October 2010, government officials from almost every country in the world will meet in Nagoya for the 10th Conference of Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP10). The aim of the Convention, which came into effect in 1993, is simple but momentous: ...
Keiko Kubota selected and prepared the cheeses served at the 2008 G8 summit in Hokkaido. A cheese sommelier and the manager of Restaurant Gentil in Shizuoka City, Kubota has written two books on how to become a cheese sommelier and is on the board ...
Ask the experts what makes a good cheese, and at some point the conversation is going to get down to grass. After all, cheese comes from milk, and the best milk comes from animals raised on grass. “In Europe, especially in the mountains, there ...
Umbrella handles. Pens. Popsicle sticks. Lots and lots of toothbrushes. These are just a few of the items that make up the approximately 13 million sq. km Eastern Garbage Patch, an immense plastic soup in the Pacific Ocean that starts about 800 km off ...
