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P/SUNNY
NTT DoCoMo Inc., despite being Japan’s biggest mobile phone carrier, has been struggling against tough smartphone competition from KDDI Corp. and Softbank Corp., which is leading in that area. But one edge that the cellphone behemoth — it has more than 60 million subscribers ...
Throughout most of Japan, June is the rainy season. While all that rainfall is great for rice paddies so that we can have delicious new harvest rice in the fall, it makes it a rather dull month for seasonal produce: The summer’s bounty of ...
If you don’t get into the ring once or twice, then you’re a coward, Geoffrey Ima says as he describes people’s attitudes toward boxing in his hometown in Uganda. Ima has been in the ring hundreds of times and came to love boxing so ...
Claude Regy says the team at the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) threw him the “best birthday party ever” when he arrived in Japan just days after the actual May 1 occasion. The 90-year-old French director is hoping for an even better birthday gift, ...
The 27-year-old defender says he was ready for a change of scenery after helping Sanfrecce Hiroshima win theJ. League title last season.
Joerg Schnackenberg, 51, from Germany, and his wife, Teruka, 59, met in Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture, in 1995. Joerg, a biochemist who came to Japan right after finishing his Ph.D. at a German university, had been working at a private marine technology institute in Kamaishi ...
Nara native Atsushi Takagi and Mihaela Serbulea from Bucharest met in 2003 when Mihaela gave a lecture on SARS for an international exchange organization in which Atsushi is a member. They hit it off at a social gathering after the lecture, when they found ...
Dave Greatbanks of England met his future wife, Mimari, in 2000 when he was teaching English at a language school in Niigata that she attended once a week after work. Dave, 35, was born at an army garrison in Yorkshire where his father worked, ...
Jamie Paquin and Nozomi Mihara, who jointly own an all-Canadian wine shop that opened in Tokyo last year, met by chance at a cafe six years ago. They were sitting next to each other — Nozomi studying English and Jamie Japanese — and started ...
Japanese-American John Shiomi, 40, and his wife, Misako, 32, met in the city of Fukuoka in January last year. Misako had posted a message about wanting a friend in the online version of Fukuoka Now, a free publication for foreigners in the area. After ...
Shiro Matsuoka, 39, from Kawasaki, and Zhang Yi, 33, who hails from Changchung, China, first met in 2004 when they were working part-time at a McDonald’s in Tokyo. Shiro was studying to become a chiropractor and Yi was studying English, and they worked early ...
Tomoyuki Akiyama and his wife, Stephanie Napier, were brought up in completely different environments, but about a decade ago, fate led them to an encounter at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. The couple dated for over a year, then moved to Texas ...
American Chris Holland and Lisa Kakinoki from Yokohama, both 26, first met in 2006 when they were studying at J.F. Oberlin University in Tokyo. Chris was a philosophy major at the University of Hawaii who was visiting on a one-year program to study Japanese ...
Nicholas Canalos, 31, from Ohio, and Akiko, 29, who hails from Saitama Prefecture, both studied and aspired at university to become English teachers — in their respective home countries. The couple first met in Tokyo at a “juku” (supplementary school) for junior high and ...
Yoichi Kubota, a scholar in environmental planning and design, met Patmakorn Suntharothok, who was to become his future wife, for the first time when she was studying business management in the United States 12 years ago. Pat (short for Patmakorn) happened to be researching ...
Dale Araki is a third-generation Japanese-American who spent most of his childhood in Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina before settling in San Francisco. It was there in 1977 that he first met Shoko, who was to become his future wife. They enrolled in ...
Hiroshi Kato, 40, born in Sendai and raised in Kawasaki, met his wife Ying — from Harbin in northeast China — in Tokyo in fall 2007. Ying, 32, who followed her older sister to Japan in 2001, was working as a secretary at a ...