16
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.
Traditional Tokyo gets the two-hour mystery treatment in “Yorozuya Chobei no Sumidagawa Jiken Fairu Sono Ni” (Chobei Yorozuya’s Sumidagawa Incident File No. 2; TBS, Mon., 9 p.m.). The hero, Chobei Yorozuya (Kotaro Satomi), is a pawn shop owner in Tokyo’s Asakusa district who has ...
It takes a special kind of determination to make it as a professional athlete, especially when personal problems get in the way. The stories told on “Athlete Kando Gekijo” (Athlete Emotional Theater; TV Tokyo, Wed., 9:54 p.m.) are of people who overcame adversity to ...
Since he’s cute and mischievous, the Disney character Stitch, introduced in the 2002 animated feature “Lilo and Stitch,” is perfect for the Japanese market, and the locally produced TV series “Stitch” (TV Asahi, Tues., 7 p.m.) transplants the little blue extraterrestrial from Hawaii to ...
The title character of the new Fuji TV series, “Massugu Otoko” (Tues., 10:15 p.m.), is, as the title indicates, a “straightforward man,” though some might see obsessive- compulsion in his scrupulous adherence to a personal code of ethics. Kenichiro (Ryuta Sato) works for a ...
Celebrities need love, too, which seems to be the point of “Ai no Onayami Keiketsu” (Solutions to the Anguish of Love; Nihon TV, Tues., 8:54 p.m.), where a group of stars and former stars receive romantic advice from a marriage counselor, a psychiatrist and ...
As its name indicates, the popular cake baumkuchen was not invented in Japan, though its ubiquity on store shelves may suggest otherwise. It was introduced to Japan by a German baker, whose story is told on the historical documentary series, “Rekishi Hiwa Historia” (History’s ...
There are rumors that “SMAP × SMAP,” the long-running variety show featuring Japan’s most enduring boy band, will be ending sometime this year as its members increasingly follow individual paths. Moday is SMAP Day over at Fuji TV, which will be airing the group’s ...
SMAP’s leader, Masahiro Nakai, is not just this year’s co-emcee of NHK’s New Year’s Eve song contest again. He’s hosting specials throughout this week and next all over the TV dial. Monday night he’s the emcee on “Ju-moji de Kaisetsu Dekitara Kako Ii!” (You’re ...
SMAP’s leader, Masahiro Nakai, is not just this year’s co-emcee of NHK’s New Year’s Eve song contest again. He’s hosting specials throughout this week and next all over the TV dial. Monday night he’s the emcee on “Ju-moji de Kaisetsu Dekitara Kako Ii!” (You’re ...
When Katsuya Nomura left the Rakuten Golden Eagles baseball team as manager recently, he was celebrated by the mainstream press as one of the greatest leaders in the game while at the same time derided by the tabloid press, which claimed his players were ...
The hundredth anniversary of the birth of mystery author Seicho Matsumoto, who wrote the original story on which the current movie hit “Zero no Shoten” is based, continues to be celebrated on the small screen this week with a new version of his classic ...
The issue of organ transplants gets pulled into service for the two-hour suspense drama, “Egao: Jugonenme no Uso” (The Smiling Face: Fifteenth Year Lie; TBS, Mon., 9 p.m.). Hideo Inaba (Ken Ishiguro) drives a municipal street car for a living and spends his off-hours ...