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NTT DoCoMo Inc., despite being Japan’s biggest mobile phone carrier, has been struggling against tough smartphone competition from KDDI Corp. and Softbank Corp., which is leading in that area. But one edge that the cellphone behemoth — it has more than 60 million subscribers ...
Throughout most of Japan, June is the rainy season. While all that rainfall is great for rice paddies so that we can have delicious new harvest rice in the fall, it makes it a rather dull month for seasonal produce: The summer’s bounty of ...
If you don’t get into the ring once or twice, then you’re a coward, Geoffrey Ima says as he describes people’s attitudes toward boxing in his hometown in Uganda. Ima has been in the ring hundreds of times and came to love boxing so ...
Claude Regy says the team at the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) threw him the “best birthday party ever” when he arrived in Japan just days after the actual May 1 occasion. The 90-year-old French director is hoping for an even better birthday gift, ...
The 27-year-old defender says he was ready for a change of scenery after helping Sanfrecce Hiroshima win theJ. League title last season.
It is a tricky deal being an authorized biographer. Charles Moore’s big advantage over those who have previously tackled Margaret Thatcher is that he has been provided with material denied to them. Of the arrangement that he was offered by his subject, he writes: “I would have full access to ...
In “The Lion’s Game” (2000) and “The Lion” (2010), Nelson DeMille’s character NYPD Detective John Corey battles and defeats Asad ...
There has long been a taste in Japan for the bizarre and abnormal. The experimental Taisho Era was no exception. ...
When, in early 2011, Eric Schmidt stepped aside from his position as Google’s CEO to become the company’s executive chairman, some of us were reminded of Dean Acheson’s famous gibe about postwar Britain — which had “lost an empire but not yet found a ...
Neoliberalism has been found wanting — at least by the “99 percent” and a growing army of economists — so what is to take its place? Karl Marx says something other than capitalism. David Sainsbury, a former British Labour minister, and Geoff Mulgan, Tony ...
How can we separate the dancer from the dance? Vaslav Nijinsky’s art was a vanishing act, and his mystique depended on gestures that lasted only a second, like his leap through a window in “The Spectre of a Rose,” or the slight but scandalous ...
Japan used to be the world’s leading foreign aid donor in the 1990s, spreading most of its largesse around Asia. But since 2001, Japan has slipped to fifth in donor rankings as budget deficits and the absence of strong political support lead to cuts ...
One of the most sensational events of Japan’s “Christian century” was the European trip of “the four boys,” described some years ago by Michael Cooper in “The Japanese Mission to Europe” (2005). The sight of these gracious princelings in the Catholic courts of Italy, ...
Mohsin Hamid’s new novel comes with a ringing endorsement on its back cover from Jay McInerney, a writer one doesn’t readily associate with subcontinental fictions about escaping poverty. But McInerney can speak with authority on second-person narration, having written “Bright Lights, Big City,” one ...
This is a whale of a book — both unusually massive and extremely informative and stimulating. The title means “mask” in Latin and is probably an allusion to Yukio Mishima’s first full-length novel, “Confessions of a Mask,” published in Japan in 1949 and translated ...
"Hello, Cutie!" is a cute book about cute things and the (sometimes cute) people who create those things.
As G.G. Rowley notes in the preface to her lovingly researched, elegantly written study of Imperial concubine Nakanoin Nakako, the history of her subject's period, the late 16th and early 17th centuries, "has traditionally been written as the history of men."
SHINTO SHRINES: A Guide to the Sacred Sites of Japan’s Ancient Religion, by Joseph Cali with John Dougill. University of Hawaii Press, 2012, 328 pp., $24.99 (paperback) KYOTO MACHIYA RESTAURANT GUIDE: Affordable Dining in Traditional Townhouse Spaces, by Judith Clancy. Stone Bridge Press, 2012, ...
I’m torn. I can’t work out whether the Occupy movements were responsible for their own demise; and I can’t work out whether I’ve had enough of reading tomes about the brave new world of revolutionary consensus-building. THE DEMOCRACY PROJECT: A History, a Crisis, a ...
It is 1936. Daphne Linden, the unworldly, 18-year-old daughter of a priapic Oxford professor, is sent to finishing school in Germany along with a slew of other nice young girls, all of whom unwittingly get caught up in a period of tumultuous political upheaval. ...