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 ...
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 ...
Kazunobu Seto and his wife, Robin, met in his hometown of Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, in 2004. Robin, from Thunder Bay, Ontario, was a teacher on a one-year contract at an English conversational school in Kanazawa. They met at a sports club they had both ...
