AP A car bomb exploded outside a mosque Sunday, killing at least 37 people and wounding another 141 in a mostly Shiite Muslim neighborhood in the southern Pakistan city of Karachi — the third mass-casualty attack on the minority sect in the country this ...
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 ...
The moment Birmingham Royal Ballet principal dancer Robert Parker began talking about cartwheels, everything seemed to change. By then the formal stage of this year’s first-ever Japanese auditions for the world-renowned Elmhurst School for Dance in England’s second city of Birmingham had concluded. Next, ...
A year ago, Songha Cho changed his professional name to plain and simple Songha — explaining that there is no appropriate kanji for Cho, though there is for Songha. That problem, the third-generation Korean-Japanese said, is just one of many complications faced in daily ...
One day, William Tuckett’s big sister decided that she wanted to take ballet classes. Soon after, Tuckett’s mother realized that if both her children went to the class, she could have two hours free to herself. He may have had no choice attending classes ...
Choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is nutty about anime and manga. Speaking to him at a cafe in his native Antwerp, Cherkaoui drops all the right names into his conversation and gets as giddy as an otaku (obsessive) discussing Japanese pop culture. However, this 35-year-old ...
The late classical composer Teizo Matsumura, American film director Martin Scorsese, and playwright/director Keiko Miyata may seem an unlikely trio, but they share a reverence for “Silence,” the 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo. Matsumura (1929-2007) spent more than 13 years composing an opera based ...
The Japanese are often described as being inward-looking and stoic, with a sense of humor that often fails to connect with people from overseas. However, there are still rare birds among that bunch. Condors are an all-male, 12-member dance troupe that was formed and ...
“This is Spam,” says Eric Idle to a room full of Japanese journalists, holding up a can of the precooked meat product that he and his fellow Monty Python cast members mocked to lasting effect in 1970 in their iconic BBC TV series. That ...
As kabuki fans will already know, for more than 30 years, the Kokaido (public hall) in Asakusa has celebrated the Tokyo district’s history as a thriving entertainment area by reviving the Edo Period (1603-1867) tradition of New Year’s special kabuki performances. These shows have ...
The place to start when reviewing this year’s highlights in contemporary Japanese theater, has to be The Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11. That day led to a nation in mourning, an ongoing nuclear crisis and an awakening among dramatists, who saw the ...
On his second-ever professional tour in Europe, dancer Naoki Takagishi fought through injuries as he worked with modern-dance choreographer Maurice Bejart for the first time. “I was only 22 years old,” Takagishi tells The Japan Times. “Mr. Bejart first saw me dance before the ...
Japan’s performing arts world is massively centered on Tokyo, yet one of its leading lights is based in Aomori City in the country’s deeply unchic far north — and he’s a school teacher. Each morning during term time, Seigo Hatasawa, a 47-year-old playwright, director ...
Take any teenager nearly 10,000 km (6,000 miles) from home on their first-ever overseas trip and you are bound to reap wonder. For 16-year-old French ballerina Sylvie Guillem, who came to Tokyo with the Paris Opera Ballet School in 1981, that wonder grew into ...
