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P/CLOUDY
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.
These days a college education doesn’t get you as far as it used to, though it comes in handy for solving crimes, apparently. The hero of the two-hour suspense drama “Katei Kyoshi ga Toku” (“Private Tutor Solves the Case”; TBS, Mon., 9 p.m.) is ...
Everybody on TV knows their place and what’s expected of them, so the “women’s pride battle” on the variety show “London Hearts” (TV Asahi, Tues., 9 p.m.) needs to be qualified. What kind of women? Pride in what? The subtitle of this week’s contest ...
The life of a pro athlete can be grueling, but 37-year-old soccer player Dan Ito has a perverse determination to make his even more so.
Aki Yashiro is known as the Queen of Enka, or “Japanese ballads,” according to the standard translation. However, Yashiro started out singing jazz in hostess clubs and didn’t make her enka debut until 1971, when she was 21 years old. Last year she finally ...
A sequel to an award-winning original script solicited by TBS and Kodansha publishing, “Neko Ben to Tomei Ningen” (“The Cat Lawyer and the Invisible Man”; TBS, Mon., 9 p.m.) stars Hidetaka Yoshioka as Taro Momose, a graduate of the University of Tokyo’s law department ...
It’s been said that Japanese people, especially younger ones, no longer travel abroad in search of adventure. This week there are three programs that go looking for Japanese people who do just that. One of the shows is the special two-hour premiere of a ...
The March 2011 accident at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant forced the relocation of hundreds of families, and since then television has made a concerted effort to keep us informed as to their situation. On Tuesday, NHK will air a special about ...
“Paji,” a manga that won an award from the Cultural Agency, has been turned into a two-hour TV drama (TV Tokyo, Wed., 9 p.m.). The title is a mash-up of “papa” and “ojiisan” (grandfather) and describes the main character, Mokuchi (Shiro Ito), a 71-year-old ...
The doctor shows just keep coming, but the two-part “Kyokuhoku Rhapsody” (NHK-G, Tues.-Wed., 10 p.m.) borrows a current issue from the headlines to make its dramatic point. Eita Nagayama plays Dr. Imanaka, the only full-time physician working at the Kyokuhoku Municipal Hospital in Hokkaido ...
Reiko Ohara died in 2009 after a long illness and an even longer time out of the public eye. In the 1970s and ’80s, she was one of the busiest and most respected actresses in Japan. On Wednesday, TV Tokyo is presenting a two-hour ...
If love is the drug, then chemistry explains everything, right? That seems to be the premise of the four-part miniseries “Renai wa Kagaku da” (“Love is Science”; Fuji TV, Mon.-Fri., 11 p.m.). Four popular young female TV personalities — LiLiCo, Shelly, Mizuki Yamamoto and ...
An endangered plant or animal species symbolizes a world that changes irrevocably every moment, but there are also man-made things that vanish. This week, on the variety show “Takeshi no Nippon no Mikata” (“Takeshi’s Way of Viewing Japan”; TV Tokyo, Fri., 10 p.m.), comedian-filmmaker ...