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A sit-in by visa violators and their families entered its second day Tuesday in front of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau with protesters seeking government good will. The action at the bureau in Minato Ward is being organized by the Asian People’s Friendship Society, ...
Kazuhiro Shiraishi, 66, is a guest-house manager in the Izu-kogen Highlands, a famous resort area on the Izu Peninsula of Shizuoka Prefecture. Looking out onto the Pacific Ocean, and just 90 minutes by train from Tokyo, Izu has a warm climate all year round ...
“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, ...
When speaking of Japanese art, people use words such as wabi and sabi, words that speak of a delicate sensibility and an ephemeral existence. Viewing the retrospective currently being hosted at the Musee Tomo in Tokyo’s central Toranomon district in celebration of the 100th ...
Have you ever given your best effort while striving to achieve something but felt like what you were doing was futile? That’s the feeling I’m getting about Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Olympics. With just over three months to go until the IOC ...
Robert Gumley, general manager of Elanex Japan KK, a translation service, has learned that Japan is an easy country for foreigners to live in — if they choose to be bicultural. “I would say, ‘Don’t try to become Japanese.’ One good thing about Japan ...
Umberto Donati, the 65-year-old director of the Italian Institute of Culture, is a force of nature when it comes to seizing every opportunity to introduce his country’s paintings, books, art exhibitions and language courses to Japanese. A vivid-red edifice near the Imperial Palace, IIC ...
Hans Damen came to Japan from his native Holland 16 years ago, attracted by the traditional aspects of Japanese culture, like “taiko” drumming and ikebana flower arrangement. After teaching flower design at a school in Tokyo for a year, he landed a job with ...
Don’t be a nail that sticks up. Assimilate. That’s the advice John C. Wocher, executive vice president at Kameda Medical Center in Kamogawa, Chiba Prefecture, has for fellow foreigners eyeing a long-term stay in Japan. Wocher, who was stationed at the Kamiseya base in ...
Don’t be a nail that sticks up. Assimilate. That’s the advice John C. Wocher, executive vice president at Kameda Medical Center in Kamogawa, Chiba Prefecture, has for fellow foreigners eyeing a long-term stay in Japan. Wocher, who was stationed at the Kamiseya base in ...
Nguyen Dinh Dang didn’t choose Japan so much as Japan chose him. The Soviet-trained Vietnamese nuclear physicist and painter first came to live here in 1995 at the invitation of Riken, a semigovernmental science and technology research institute. “I was first invited to the ...
Harry Hill, president of TV shopping channel operator Oak Lawn Marketing Inc., received a lot of discouraging comments from Japanese when he thought about selling the “Billy’s Boot Camp” exercise DVDs. “People say, ‘We Japanese don’t do that.’ It’s amazing. Does everybody in Japan ...
Chuck Wilson, 63, is a fitness trainer. But he was — and arguably still is — far more famous as a funny foreigner who speaks in a defiantly casual and blunt manner to TV personality bigwigs. Costarring with Beat Takeshi, now better known as ...
As a “blonde-haired, blue-eyed” American woman living in the rural farmlands of Tokushima Prefecture with a Japanese husband and their twin children, one with hearing disabilities, author and novelist Suzanne Kamata has gained a unique perspective on life in Japan. And she is not ...
Earnest Higa’s life is all about being bicultural in Japan and the United States. He has used this aspect of his character in his career, spending the past 24 years making sure U.S.-based Domino Pizza fits in Japan. “I was lucky to have both ...
Gene Otani, a Japanese national who attended an international school in Kobe throughout his youth, had to take Japanese lessons as a salaried worker when he realized he needed more skill in reading and writing. Convinced that “communication is everything,” Otani, now a main ...
Staff writer English-teaching? No. Military? No. Corporate transfer? No. None of the usual templates comes close to describing how Maia Maniglier ended up in Japan. Audacious bubble-era corporate recruiting experiment? That might do it. The tale of the Israeli-born Frenchwoman’s move to Tokyo began ...