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DRIZZLE/RAIN
Farmers in the city of Tamura, Fukushima Prefecture, have begun planting rice in a district once designated a no-go zone because of radioactive fallout ejected by the disaster-hit Fukushima No. 1 power plant.
Recently I was asked to write a blurb for a new liquid plant-nutrient. As soon as I saw the name of the product, 早根早起 （Hayane Hayaoki), I smiled at this example of linguistic creativity.
Life in Japan just seems tailor-made for certain foreign residents, who slip into the fabric of this society as smoothly as a hand slides into a glove. American Curtis Patterson, a professional koto player and music teacher, is a case in point. Not only ...
Denmark’s Emmelie de Forest won this year’s Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday night with her ethno-inspired flute and drum tune “Only Teardrops,” despite tough competition from spectacular stage shows by performers from Azerbaijan and Ukraine. Juries and television viewers across Europe awarded the barefoot, ...
One team’s quest for a first title has ended. The other team’s fight will continue next season. The Yokohama B-Corsairs outplayed the Rizing Fukuoka in Sunday’s bj-league championship game, controlling the tempo for larger stretches and making enough timely baskets to fill an instructional ...
It's prayer time at Tokyo's biggest mosque and the congregation is pondering God, community and Naoki Inose, the city's governor, who many here say has revealed himself to be, well, a bit of a bigot.
"Stupid", "shockingly provincial" and "a sign of how little Japanese people really understand that part of the world" were among ...
A national media exerts a powerful influence over the lives of members of its society. For example, rumors or untruths ...
May in Japan is the perfect month for mothers. Wreathed in the fertile blooms of spring, bolstered by days of absolute perfection, May is also a month of muddy contradiction.
After spending 2½ years living the quiet life in Shiga Prefecture, Ryukoku University student Victor Rosenhoj was looking forward to moving to Kyoto, where things promised to be more lively and international.
Things were going well for Patrick after a year in Japan. He had found a job he liked, met a girl he planned to marry and was ready to move out of the small room his older brother, a longtime resident, was letting him ...
As Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Cabinet rush to diminish the Bank of Japan’s bothersome independence, join the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations (sort of . . .), start pouring lovely, popular concrete before the summer House of Councilors elections and (sotto voce) maybe even ...
In February 2012, a small band of sacked workers in Japan took on one of the world’s biggest investment banks, Goldman Sachs, unionizing in a bid to keep their jobs and win a better deal from a firm they believed had treated them unfairly. ...
Crucial to any public discussion is defining the terms of debate. However, often those terms must be redefined later because they don’t reflect reality. One example is Japan’s concept of “foreigner,” because the related terminology is confusing and provides pretenses for exclusionism. In terms ...
The story reads like a New Zealand news editor’s wish list: Celebrity, dangerous weapons, bizarre behavior, death threats, Brazilian street gangs and a mysterious love interest.
In the final scenes of Aaron Sorkin’s powerfully written film “A Few Good Men,” one of the U.S. Marines on trial for the murder of a fellow serviceman is bewildered as to why he has not been cleared of all charges after his commanding ...
In rock mythology, John Lennon was the cynical, acid-tongued Beatle, Paul McCartney was friendly and open, George Harrison was the quiet one and drummer Ringo Starr was the group’s clown, always joking around. Satoko Condon remembers it a bit differently. “Ringo was a bit ...
Bad guys rarely live up to their reputation, and so it was with James Blackston. Portrayed in the Irish media as a fearsome, muscle-bound rapper, in court he was a diminutive, baby-faced figure, his tattoos covered up by a cheap prison suit, mumbling his ...
Angela Furlong is trying to recall her darkest point in the trial of the man accused of murdering her daughter. Was it the moment she faced him in court after months of living in dread?
It was shaping up to be just another day at practice. The high school’s head basketball coach, who was young and still trying to establish himself, was picking on the captain of the once-famous girls’ team, jumping on her every mistake and yelling at ...