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 ...
Anyone who has read any of the 50-plus books that Lester Brown has authored or co-authored (in any of the 40-odd languages into which they’ve been translated) might easily imagine him to be another gloomy environmentalist. At least that was the kind of person ...
Year in, year out, it never ceases to amaze me what a difference a day makes. In an instant, December ends, January begins, and a miraculous transformation takes place. For the reverent and the riotous equally, midnight wipes the cosmic slate clean. Through some ...
This Christmas Day column is a book review, but it is also a wish and a prayer. The wish is that the book might, even in some small way, contribute to the development of robust and open debate over Japan’s energy future, the options ...
If you’re like my 17-year-old, then you probably already know just about everything there is to know, and reading this column you’ll likely just say: “Yeah, right, whatever,” or “So?” But if you have a few minutes, younger readers especially, please bear with me. ...
“Of all the places in all the world where no one in their right mind would build scores of nuclear power plants, Japan would be pretty near the top of the list,” wrote Leuren Moret in a “Power and the people” Timeout special in ...
On Sept. 19, just as this column hit deadline, news outlets reported that a massive demonstration was taking place in Tokyo, rallying tens of thousands of people against nuclear power. The next day, in a move that seemingly intended to demoralize this unprecedented expression ...
Last February, I wrote an Our Planet Earth column titled “Don’t give up on Japan’s kids,” noting there that despite all the hand-wringing that goes on about this nation’s young people, my own experience with university students gives me cause for considerable optimism. I ...
An old friend is a successful investment banker who makes more money in a year than I will make in my lifetime. Like many people, though, he would like to make even more. Standing in his way, he believes, are lawyers and environmentalists. If ...
As Japan has struggled with the physical and emotional challenges of the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and tsunami of March 11, and the ongoing nuclear crisis that resulted, I have written three Our Planet Earth columns related to those events: one on Japan’s response ...
Lawyer Tom Twomey knows far more than most of us about the importance of citizen participation in making energy policy. That’s because Twomey has spent four decades keeping a watchful eye on electric power suppliers in New York — and he’s learned that what ...
Viewed from abroad, there is no doubt that Japan is suffering an unmitigated disaster. In my position as the director of an International Center at a Japanese university, I have been asked time and again by our partner universities overseas: “Is Japan safe?” Everyone ...
For two weeks now, ever since death and destruction swept northeastern Japan, all of us here have been trying to get our heads around this catastrophe. The number of victims is mind-numbing; the fatalities, the missing, the homeless. The longer-term challenges, too — environmentally, ...
