Transport authorities launched a full-fledged investigation Sunday into the derailment of a bullet train on the Akita Shinkansen Line in Daisen, Akita Prefecture, on Saturday afternoon.
It's a dangerous, unpredictable world. Twice in January Chinese warships in the East China Sea challenged Japan's Maritime Self Defense Forces patrols in a manner deemed threatening. And on Feb. 12 came North Korea's nuclear test.
Here's an open secret: Japanese men have a bad international reputation on the romance front.
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, ...
Kenta Maeda shook off worries about his form with five shutout innings as Japan beat China 5-2 in first-round Pool A of the World Baseball Classic on Sunday at Fukuoka Dome. Japan improved to 2-0 following a tough win over Brazil in Saturday evening’s ...
INDIAN SUMMER, by Mieko Kanai, translated by Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley. Cornell East Asia Series, 2012, 149 pp., $24 (paperback) Mieko Kanai is a prolific and provocative contemporary author whose poetry and short stories have been appearing in English since the 1970s and ...
"The evolution of political thought in this relatively isolated island nation during the period in question is unique to the point of being somewhat freakish,” writes political thought scholar Hiroshi Watanabe of the University of Tokyo.
BONES OF CONTENTION: Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan, by Barbara R. Ambros. University of Hawaii Press, 2012, 255 pp., $29 (paperback) Bumping into a Japanese acquaintance on the street recently, I inquired where he was going on his day off dressed in a ...
Joy Division played only three years’ worth of gigs and released a whopping total of two studio albums.
The last completed book we are likely to get from Maurice Sendak remembers a man he often insisted was the real genius of the family, his brother Jack. Maurice Sendak died last May at age 83 after years of health problems, but had managed ...
Lutz Becker was born in Berlin, he says, “during the anno diabolo, 1941. Mine was the generation that was sent into a dark pit.” Meeting this survivor of the Third Reich, now in his 70s and living in Bayswater, London, it’s hard to suppress ...
Why then did the Englishman who had it all decide to throw away his successful 30-year career at the Japanese corporate icon to blow the whistle on his fellow directors?
DEPRESSION IN JAPAN: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress, by Junko Kitanaka. Princeton University Press, 2011, 264 pp., $29.95 (paperback) Twenty-first century Japan is in the throes of a depression epidemic. Until the late 1990s, mental depression was not widely diagnosed or treated ...
WILD: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed. Knopf, 2012, 336 pp., $25.95 (hardcover) In this hugely entertaining book, Cheryl Strayed takes the redemptive nature of travel — a theme as old as literature itself — and makes it ...
Routinely acclaimed as a giant of world cinema in his lifetime, Akira Kurosawa has slipped in the global director league rankings since his death in 1998.
RIVER OF FIRE and Other Stories, by O Chonghui. Translated by Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton. Columbia University Press, 2012, 224 pp., $27.50 (hardcover) I can’t remember a book of fiction that felt as much like a force-feeding as this one has. It seems only ...
ASIA FOR THE ASIANS: China in the Lives of Five Meiji Japanese, by Paula S. Harrell. Merwin Asia, 2012, 407 pp., $35 (paperback) The radical makeover Japan prescribed itself in the course of the Meiji reforms, driven by entirely justified fear of Western domination, ...
