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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 ...
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 ...
Within two hours of the massive earthquake that jolted Japan at 2:46 p.m. on March 11, 2011, the Japanese government received notice that an “Article 15 event” had occurred at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant.
For the past year, Tokyo sixth-grader Manami has had dinner at home an average of four times a week. The rest of the time she has had to make do with a juku-ben, a boxed dinner prepared by her mother and consumed between classes ...
Last November, a reader in Hokkaido named Stephanie sent me an article read in Japan’s elementary schools. Featured in a sixth-grader magazine called Chagurin (from “child agricultural green”) dated December 2012, it was titled “Children of America, the Poverty Superpower” (hinkon taikoku Amerika no ...
Here's an open secret: Japanese men have a bad international reputation on the romance front.
Some choice cuts from "Love With a Western Woman: A Guide for Japanese Men."
Cast in bronze, Hachiko sits in a position of prominence befitting a storied daimyo or prime minister, right next to the busiest intersection in Japan, if not the world.
Not too long ago, I heard from a foreign resident of Tokyo looking for a high school for her daughter, a 14-year-old who will begin her final year of junior high in April. Both parent and child were extremely excited about recently discovering a ...
On Jan. 1, The Japan Times’ lead story was “Summer poll to keep Abe in check.” It made the argument that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party alliance falls short of a majority in the Upper House, so until elections happen this summer ...
Japan has a new hara. No, the nice couple down the hall didn't just have a baby; according to recent news, yet another form of harassment is supposedly becoming a social problem.