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A sit-in by visa violators and their families entered its second day Tuesday in front of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau with protesters seeking government good will. The action at the bureau in Minato Ward is being organized by the Asian People’s Friendship Society, ...
Kazuhiro Shiraishi, 66, is a guest-house manager in the Izu-kogen Highlands, a famous resort area on the Izu Peninsula of Shizuoka Prefecture. Looking out onto the Pacific Ocean, and just 90 minutes by train from Tokyo, Izu has a warm climate all year round ...
“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, ...
Takashi Miike's blood-soaked vengeance tale, one of two Japanese films being shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, draws the biggest boos so far, with critics savaging it as overacted and cliched.
Have you ever given your best effort while striving to achieve something but felt like what you were doing was futile? That’s the feeling I’m getting about Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Olympics. With just over three months to go until the IOC ...
This superb book charts the improbable rise of South Korea from the devastation of war and impoverishment to rapid development and prosperity, and from brutal dictatorship to the most vibrant democracy in Asia. It is "impossible" in terms of its economic and political achievements, ...
THINKING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, by Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder. Penguin, 2013, 432 pp. $18 (paperback) Fame came too late for Tony Judt. He was 57 in 2005 when he published his history of Europe after 1945, “Postwar,” the book that sealed his reputation ...
THE ROMANTIC ECONOMIST, by William Nicolson. Short Books, 2013, 304 pp., ￡12 (hardcover) Right at the end of “The Romantic Economist” — nonspoiler alert! — the author William Nicolson starts referring in the third person to “William Nicolson,” the protagonist of the pages. It ...
FALLOUT FROM FUKUSHIMA, by Richard Broinowski. Scribe Publications, 2012, 273 pp., A$27.95 (paperback) Most books about the nuclear reactor accident of Fukushima No. 1 are very opinionated. Given the many repercussions of the disaster, it is not surprising that people find it difficult to ...
NATURAL DISASTER AND NUCLEAR CRISIS IN JAPAN, edited by Jeff Kingston. Routledge, 2012, 304 pp., ￡28.99 (paperback) RECONSTRUCTING 3/11, edited by “Our Man in Abiko” et al. Abiko Free Press, 2012, 82 pp., $4.23 (digital; print version available upon demand) As Japan marks the ...
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, ...
PLAY IT AGAIN, by Alan Rusbridger. Jonathan Cape, 2013, 416 pp., £18.99 (hardcover) In middle age, some men take up marathon running. Others climb the Matterhorn or buy a red sports car. Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, decides to master Frédéric Chopin’s First ...
ONNA NI, by Shuntaro Tanikawa, with etchings by Yoko Sano, translated by William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura. Shueisha, 2012, 80 pp., ¥1,470 (paperback) Shuntaro Tanikawa, born in 1931, is one of the most acclaimed poets in Japan — well known not only from ...
DETROIT: An American Autopsy, by Charlie LeDuff. Penguin Press, 2013, 286 pp., $27.95 (hardcover) Charlie LeDuff’s “Detroit: An American Autopsy” is a hard-eyed look at some of the recent villains and victims of a city battered for half a century by political corruption, racial strife ...
101 MODERN JAPANESE POEMS, compiled by Makoto Ooka, translated by Paul McCarthy, edited by Janine Beichman. Thames River Press, 2012, 144 pp., $45.00 (hardcover) When a new anthology of American poetry appears — The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove ...
ORIGINS OF LOVE, by Kishwar Desai. Simon & Schuster, 2013, 496 pp., £7.99 (paperback) Kishwar Desai calls her novels social thrillers; books set in the beating heart of modern-day India that lay bare its caldron of inequalities, injustices and cultural traditions. The first, 2010′s ...
SALVATION OF A SAINT, by Keigo Higashino. Little Brown, 2013, 376 pp., £12.99 (hardcover) When the pregnant lover of a murder victim receives the sympathetic ministrations from the deceased’s wife at the funeral service, you know you are in no ordinary emotional terrain. This ...