26
P/SUNNY
Tokyo Skytree will celebrate its first anniversary Wednesday but has not yet completed its prime mission of reliably broadcasting to households in the capital and its suburbs. Since December, the world’s tallest free-standing tower, at 634 meters high, has been making test broadcasts to ...
If you work in an office, you probably spend a fair part of your time sitting at a desk, which, of course, isn’t very healthy. To combat that the Pomodoro technique recommends that you work in intervals with regular breaks — for example, 25 ...
“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, ...
"Outsider art" is relatively new in Japan and, as a genre, works made by self-taught Japanese artists are still not very well known on the category-delineating, label-loving international art scene.
After all these years, Rafael Nadal still knows how to dominate Roger Federer. In the 30th meeting between the two tennis greats, Nadal controlled the final from start to finish to win 6-1, 6-3 Sunday for his seventh Italian Open title. “Rafa was just ...
At this time of the year, you may have received and sent any number of Christmas cards. Or, in the Japanese tradition, you might still be panicking about writing all the New Year’s postcards that the nation’s army of mailmen and women endeavor to ...
Kumiko Kumazawa of Pilot Corporation placed four fountain pens in front of me. “Try them and tell me the difference,” she said with a smile. I am sitting at the counter of Pen Station, a museum of writing-related items in Kyobashi, Tokyo, that’s run ...
People have been enjoying a wide variety of sports since at least the time of Ancient Greece. In the Athens 2004 Olympic Games alone, athletes competed in about 300 categories of 28 sports — and the list seems to get longer every time. In ...
In the 1960s, Japan’s first instant ramen changed people’s eating habits significantly by making it possible to get dinner in as little as three minutes. Even putting fast food and microwave dinners aside, eating has become easier and more functional since those days, due ...
Kumiko Taguchi, 59, is deputy manager of Junkudo book shop in Ikebukuro in Tokyo, which boasts the largest floor space (nine-stories) of any bookstore in Japan. Before moving to Junkudo in 1997, she worked at another bookselling giant, Libro, located opposite Junkudo. After a ...
Japan’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has declared he will continue his predecessor’s reform policies. That’s hardly a surprise, as Abe was Chief Cabinet Secretary under former leader Junichiro Koizumi, and before that was secretary general of the Liberal Democratic Party when Koizumi was ...
It’s 9 o’clock on a Monday morning. A phone rings in an office and the boss picks it up. At the other end she hears the fragile voice of one of her staff telling her she broke up with her boyfriend the day before. ...
As a cook and lifestyle guru, Harumi Kurihara has often been dubbed Japan’s answer to America’s Martha Stewart or Britain’s Delia Smith. But in February this year, she scaled new heights when the English-language edition of her book “Harumi no Japanese Cooking” — titled ...
In Nagoya City, so I heard, there’s a mountain that is really tough to conquer. But as Nagoya is on the lowland Nobi Plain straddling Aichi and Gifu prefectures, how could that be, this trained observer wondered? To check my sources as a journalist ...
At age 13, in total despair after losing her parents and two sisters, Toshiko Takagi tried to kill herself. But now, 60 years later, she stresses she never consciously tried to commit suicide. Back on that night in August 1945, she explains, it was ...
If you plan on visiting Expo 2005 Aichi, you may find you have to join long, long lines and brave the summer heat to get into the most popular pavillions. And should you go through Nagoya on your way back home, don’t be surprised ...
In their search for the soul of Nagoya — a city some dub “Japan’s best kept secret” — staff writers Setsuko Kamiya and Yoko Hani met up with five long-term foreign residents. All five happened to be American, and all have been in business ...