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 ...
Understanding how Japanese medical practice differs from that in your home country can be crucial to avoiding unwelcome surprises next time you or a loved one find yourselves in need of treatment at a local clinic or hospital. Without pre-planning, for instance, an expectant ...
Australian Catherine Jane Fisher, who was raped by a U.S. Navy sailor in Yokosuka in 2002, has now taken her case for compensation all the way to the U.S. courts. A civil judgment by a Tokyo court in 2004 ordered Bloke T. Deans to ...
The day after 19-year-old Sgt. Leroy Foster arrived on Guam’s Andersen Air Force Base, one of America’s largest Pacific military installations, in 1968, he was assigned to what his superior officers called “vegetation control duties.” “I mixed diesel fuel with Agent Orange then I ...
During the Vietnam War, 25,000 barrels of Agent Orange were stored on Okinawa, according to a recently uncovered U.S. Army report. The barrels, thought to contain over 5.2 million liters of the toxic defoliant, had been brought to Okinawa from Vietnam before apparently being ...
As Beto awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his futon into a gigantic cockroach. “What’s happened to me?” he thought. In his native land down south, he had been a person — if at times underprivileged due to his ...
Some readers’ responses to letters published in this column on July 10 (“Readers lament the ever-shrinking eikaiwa salary“) regarding Patrick Budmar’s July 3 Zeit Gist article, “The curious case of the eroding eikaiwa salary“: ALTs a waste of boards’ money I agree with much ...
Like millions of other people in Japan, I watched the events of March 2011 unfurl with shock and trepidation. The massive earthquake, the terrible tsunami and then what seemed to be a dreadful nuclear disaster. Yet now I wonder at my naivety, because the ...
Sitting across from me at a Naka-Meguro pizzeria, Riccardo Tossani pulled out his iPhone to check his Spyglass app. He glanced out the window to survey the adjacent taller buildings, ignoring the cherry blossoms that were in full bloom. “The only safe way to ...
“Sensei, Japan is such a safe country because there are no strikes. Right?” A student at the university where I teach blindsided me with this remark the other day. The vast majority of Japanese under 30 have never even witnessed industrial action and imagine ...
As in many surveys, numbers and percentages are abundant. But for me, it was that little 3.4 at the bottom of page 21 that stood out more than any other: 3.4 percent of married men in Japan say that their spouses have forced them ...
Last month the Japanese government took baby steps toward an official immigration policy. Ten ministries and several specialist “people of awareness” (yūshikisha) held meetings aimed at creating a “coexistence society” (kyōsei shakai) within which non-Japanese (NJ) would be “accepted” (uke ire). This is a ...
Now fraught with job insecurity and low pay, there was a time when the work was steady and salaries were high for those who taught English in Japan. One only has to contrast the birth of the eikaiwa (English conversation) business in the late ...
