In July 1942, seven months after the attack on Pearl Harbor that started the Pacific War, Tokyo hosted one of the most ambitious exhibitions of art the world had ever seen. “Leonardo da Vinci,” staged in an exhibition hall in the central district of ...

I will never forget the day I went to a show titled “Embracing Asia: Taeko Tomiyama Retrospective 1950-2009,” which was one of 370 art exhibits by creators from 40 countries comprising the fourth Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial staged over 50 days last autumn at locations ...

Author Joshua “Jake” Adelstein supposes that if he’d stayed home in rural Missouri and had never come to Japan, he’d probably have become a small-town lawyer or a very happy detective on the local police force. “I was always attracted to the law, probably ...

Psychiatrist Rika Kayama is an outspoken doctor specializing in mental illness, a best-selling writer and a popular social commentator. Her latest book, “Shigamitsukanai Ikikata” (“A Way of Life in Which You Don’t Cling to Anything”), has sold 422,000 copies since it was published in ...

When future historians document the story of Japanese space exploration, 2009 will likely figure as the year when the nation put two high-profile rocket launch failures, in 1999 and 2003, firmly behind it and, quite literally, took off. In June, the nation’s first blueprint ...

Donald Keene is one of the greatest scholars of Japanese literature and has been highly influential in the establishment of Japanese studies in the West. Now aged 87, the Professor Emeritus of Columbia University in New York has published around 25 books in English, ...

With his shaven head, straight back and deep, calming voice, Sokun Tsushimoto, a newly qualified physician who started practicing at a Tokyo clinic in April, clearly betrays evidence of his long and rich life experience. Until he set out on his eight-year study/training path ...

In need of a couple of Portuguese missionaries? How about a boatload of Dutch traders — or a platoon of World War II U.S. grunts? Meet Motoko Inagawa. It’s not that the sprightly 75-year-old’s network of foreign acquaintances metaphysically extends to the long dead, ...

Kang Sang Jung is one of the most influential ethnically Korean residents of Japan (zainichi). A political science professor at the University of Tokyo, he also gives lectures around the country, is a regular television commentator and has a column in the prestigious weekly ...