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A sit-in by visa violators and their families entered its second day Tuesday in front of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau with protesters seeking government good will. The action at the bureau in Minato Ward is being organized by the Asian People’s Friendship Society, ...
Kazuhiro Shiraishi, 66, is a guest-house manager in the Izu-kogen Highlands, a famous resort area on the Izu Peninsula of Shizuoka Prefecture. Looking out onto the Pacific Ocean, and just 90 minutes by train from Tokyo, Izu has a warm climate all year round ...
“I was stopped by two men in a government-registered vehicle, blindfolded and dragged off the street. They took me away to a house in a place I did not know. I was forced into a room with blood all over the walls and floor, ...
Takashi Miike's blood-soaked vengeance tale, one of two Japanese films being shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, draws the biggest boos so far, with critics savaging it as overacted and cliched.
Have you ever given your best effort while striving to achieve something but felt like what you were doing was futile? That’s the feeling I’m getting about Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Olympics. With just over three months to go until the IOC ...
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 ...
Nara’s Kasugayama Forest Reserve doesn’t look like a landscape in crisis. Under the 300-hectare old-growth woodland’s brilliant green canopy now turning to its autumn glory, trees and shrubs of every shape and size grow in shady abundance, with nearly 1,500 of the trees spanning ...
I magine being able to maintain a perfect temperature and humidity in your home year round, without spending a single yen in electricity or gas bills. That’s exactly what Professor Emile Ishida of Tohoku University in northern Japan is striving to achieve — and ...
‘Look over there! Turn out your flashlights,” exclaimed Kunihiko Otsuki one recent Sunday night as he stood in an area of broadleaf mixed woodland with five other forest enthusiasts. With the lights off, the forest returned to its primordial blackness. Below, the ocean lapped ...