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 ...
"Money shot" is a term that originally came from the pornographic-movie industry, referring to, ahem, a male actor fulfilling his contractual obligations.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that if you had to see yet another 20th-century action star, alive and well and kicking ass for the benefit of the over-40s crowd — and that star is Bruce Willis, whom you can remember as having ...
Oscar can be fickle. At a ceremony in 2010, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to take home the Academy Award for Best Director, for 2008′s “The Hurt Locker.” However, she was not nominated for the prize for this year’s Oscars, which will be ...
This hard-core adaptation of the long-running British sci-fi comic should largely erase memories of Sylvester Stallone's abominable 1995 version.
Ryuichi Hiroki has become the go-to director for romantic dramas that quality-wise are a cut above the local formula weepers whose starred-crossed lovers are parted by a slow, beautiful death (though Hiroki’s couples are hardly immune to life’s vicissitudes). At the same time, his ...
When she hears the phrase “a sense of home,” filmmaker Michale Boganim always endures a wave of sadness. “Home can mean a whole lot of things, but to me it has connotations of displacement and loss,” she tells The Japan Times. “I come from ...
It’s 1996. Anya (Olga Kurylenko) works as a guide on a tour bus that takes people through Pripyat, a town located just 3 km from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. The tourists, all of varying ages and nationalities, listen somewhat bored to ...
To be a shokunin (artisan) in Japan means, among other things, rising in the morning to do the exact same thing as yesterday and the day before and the day before.
Ahead of the Feb. 22 Japan release of “Silver Linings Playbook,” the acclaimed new film from director David O. Russell and starring Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert De Niro, a special preview screening will be held in Tokyo. The Japan Times has 10 ...
To describe “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” as a foodie film is akin to picking an English rose and calling it a flower. This documentary by New York-based David Gelb is at once a celebration of one of the world’s most popular and coveted meals, ...
Every time I witness the presence of Tom Cruise in Tokyo, I imagine the possibilities of him moving here as a permanent resident. He loves sushi (apparently a frequent customer at Sukiyabashi Jiro). He knows the streets of Ginza. He’s clearly work addicted. Unlike ...
Sex is universal, but kinks can be local. Japanese S&M, at least the varieties I’ve seen in films over the years, is less about black leather and fishnet stockings, more about candle wax and artfully elaborate knots designed to display the flesh of the ...
