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 ...
Petr Holy, who over the past two decades has spent a considerable amount of his time learning the Japanese language and culture, is now in return trying to spread the culture of his home country, the Czech Republic, throughout Japan. As director of the ...
Ruby Pawankar stumbled across Japan in 1988, when as a young physician in Pune, western India, she accompanied her Indian husband here to curate an exhibition held as part of the Festival of India in Japan. Twenty-two years later as a professor in allergy ...
Patrick Gannon admits he loves puzzles. As a literature major and aspiring writer in university, he delighted in deconstructing ideas and consciously pulling together disparate pieces to make a whole. Twenty years later, as a “cut paper” artist in Japan, Gannon, 40, employs the ...
Jose Alvares has tried to “reconnect” the Portuguese and Japanese cultures over the last 43 years he has spent in Japan. The veteran researcher of Portuguese culture and history says it’s difficult to explain why he chose to live in Japan, but he was ...
When Linda Ohama, a third-generation Japanese-Canadian, heard the news about the earthquake and tsunami that hit the Tohoku region on March 11, she says she was “very shocked” and felt a strong urge to do something for the people there — especially the children. ...
Jens Jensen makes almost anything he needs for his weekend life from scratch, from a doorknob to a window frame to a small wooden hut. Such a do-it-yourself lifestyle is fairly common in his home country, Denmark, where people try to make things that ...
Gustav Strandell believes that if there is something good about his home country, Sweden, that he can bring to Japan, it’s the concept and some of the technical skills of its social welfare system developed over its 100-year-plus history as an aging society. Born ...
Tetsuyoshi Kodama, a second-generation Japanese-Brazilian, became the first foreign national to pass the taxi driver test in Shizuoka Prefecture in 1991. After driving around the city of Hamamatsu for about four years, he took on other jobs, including at a temporary employment agency and ...
Lena Lindahl has for the past two decades produced environment-related events in Japan in an effort to apply her home country Sweden’s notion of sustainable society here. And she believes the key is education to encourage children to develop and express opinions about issues ...
Freelance travel writer Beth Reiber knows Tokyo inside out — maybe much more than most Tokyoites. Reiber, who lives in Lawrence, Kansas, wrote the Tokyo version of the Frommer’s guidebooks — one of the best-selling series of guide books published in the United States ...
American poet Arthur Binard is alert to the world around him. His interests range from trees and insects to bicycles, kotatsu (heater tables) and nuclear energy. Binard writes poems in Japanese — which is not his mother tongue — as well as in English, ...
Alessandro Gerevini, an Italian writer and translator who has lived and worked in Japan for 16 years, believes that Japanese and Italian cultures have a lot in common. Gerevini notes that, for example, the idea of family and the unique culture of food are ...
