Anyone wandering the back streets near Omiya Station at 7:20 a.m. on Sunday, June 2, might have passed a particular office building, unremarkable except for two African men standing on a 2nd floor balcony, rope in hand, lowering a car-sized Ugo (eagle) costume down ...

Giant Hello Kitty-emblazoned kudos to Japan for finally signing the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction. Now comes the hard part: actually making it work. Mistakenly identified by some press accounts as an accomplishment of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan’s accession is probably more ...

Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City houses one of Vietnam's busiest maternity clinics, but hidden in a quiet corner, far from the wards of proud new mothers, is a room stacked floor to ceiling with every parent's nightmare.

In April 2011, these Community pages published the first accounts of sick U.S. veterans who believe their illnesses were caused by exposure to Agent Orange on Okinawa during the Vietnam War era.

In 1977, British author and long-term Tokyo resident Alan Booth made a journey on foot from the northernmost point in Japan, Cape Soya, to Kyushu’s southernmost tip, Cape Sata. Booth’s account of that epic trek, “The Roads to Sata,” became one of the classic ...

I recently served as a “private sector representative” in a panel discussion before an audience of foreign graduate students at the University of Tokyo. Many of the students will soon be seeking employment in Japan; because I have spent 25 years living in or ...

“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, ...

Japan's decision to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade negotiations shows that at least some in government have accepted the fact that "opening up" Japan is in the nation's best long-term interests.

In 2012, Japan had 51.73 million workers, of which 33.3 million were regular employees, or seishain, according to the latest survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. Contingent, or nonpermanent, workers (including part-timers, haken dispatch and shokutaku semiregular employees) numbered 18.43 million, ...

"Stupid", "shockingly provincial" and "a sign of how little Japanese people really understand that part of the world" were among the reactions of Turkish residents in Kansai to Tokyo Gov. Naoki Inose's comments about Turkey and the wider Muslim world.

It's prayer time at Tokyo's biggest mosque and the congregation is pondering God, community and Naoki Inose, the city's governor, who many here say has revealed himself to be, well, a bit of a bigot.