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The head of an official inquiry into the deadly collapse of a Bangladesh factory complex said the building’s owner was the “main culprit” for the disaster because he violated construction codes. The cave-in of the eight-story Rana Plaza outside the capital last month killed ...
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 ...
“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, ...
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, ...
As far as debuts go, Shohei Otani's delivered. The celebrated rookie pitched fairly well on Thursday night, and though he finished outside the decision, he left the mound with the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters well within striking distance of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows.
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. ...