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Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s private disco featured not only aspiring showgirls performing striptease acts as sexy nuns and nurses, but one woman dressed up as President Barack Obama and a prominent Milan prosecutor whom the billionaire media mogul has accused of persecuting him, ...
Tonkatsu is comfort food, gourmand grub — not a gourmet delicacy. So what are those hearty, unpretentious deep-fried breaded pork cutlets doing in an elegant little bar-style restaurant above one of Ginza’s temples to high-end consumption? Katsuzen has come a long way from its ...
Life in Japan just seems tailor-made for certain foreign residents, who slip into the fabric of this society as smoothly as a hand slides into a glove. American Curtis Patterson, a professional koto player and music teacher, is a case in point. Not only ...
It is a tricky deal being an authorized biographer. Charles Moore’s big advantage over those who have previously tackled Margaret Thatcher is that he has been provided with material denied to them. Of the arrangement that he was offered by his subject, he writes: ...
Unbelievable energy. Splendid self confidence. Never-wavering faith in his abilities or his teammates. Those are ingredients to success for Draelon Burns, the Yokohama B-Corsairs’ super substitute. Burns buried a remarkable three buzzer-beating shots to close out the three final quarters, and his team needed ...
At the Rugby World Cup Sevens in Hong Kong in March, a group of eminent rugby journalists were talking about Japan’s bid to host Rugby World Cup 2011. After discussing — and agreeing — how the government-backed proposal by the Japan Rugby Football Union ...
Sadako Ogata, formerly United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, is one of Japan’s most prominent international figures. Born in Tokyo in 1927, she grew up in Japan, China and the United States, receiving her PhD in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. ...
For nearly three decades since his seismic debut with “Almost Transparent Blue,” which delved into the sex- and drug-fueled lives of Japanese youths in a town hosting a huge U.S. military base, author Ryu Murakami has often used his trademark explicit, offensive and guiltlessly ...
One year ago this month, an advance team from Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) arrived in Iraq on a mission — so the Japanese public was told — to help rebuild the wartorn country. The rest of the main contingent of 600 troops soon ...
Joji Yamamoto was a young, idealistic politician with a bright future — but all that promise dissolved on Sept. 4, 2000, when he was arrested on suspicion of fraud. Soon after the arrest, Yamamoto admitted his guilt. He had, indeed, pocketed more than 25 ...
Takafumi Horie, 31, has been the man in the news since the end of June, when he announced that his Tokyo-based Internet service firm, Livedoor Co., was in the market for Osaka’s debt-ravaged Kintetsu Buffaloes baseball team. In the present tumultuous state of the ...
After 17 years’ experience as a top-flight news reporter both at home and abroad, in 1991 Seiichi Kanise began a 10-year stint as a TV news anchorman. Then, after covering a wide range of news events, in 2003 he accepted an offer from the ...
Shinya Tasaki was a teenager when he made his first solo trip to France in 1977. Even back then, he was so eager to learn about French food and wine that he visited as many wineries as he could — only to be turned ...
With soldiers silhouetted against dramatic desert sunsets, or helicopters swooping over cityscapes, most mainstream-media photographs we see of the war in Iraq are nothing if not models of artistic composition and taste. For the most part, though, they are also devoid of the human ...
Back in 1972, a 30-year-old New Jersey native who had recently graduated from Tokyo’s Sophia University was in New York City, trying to talk to anyone who would listen about politics and life in Japan. Nobody was interested. “It was only when I started ...
Yayoi Kusama was just shy of 30 when she left her hometown of Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture and headed to America to meet her hero, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. It was improbable, even quixotic, but Kusama soon developed an artistic style that endeared her ...
When Ken Noguchi reached the summit of Mount Everest in 1999, at the age of 25 he became the youngest person to have scaled the highest peaks on all seven continents. Born to a Japanese father and Egyptian mother, he grew up moving around ...