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The head of an official inquiry into the deadly collapse of a Bangladesh factory complex said the building’s owner was the “main culprit” for the disaster because he violated construction codes. The cave-in of the eight-story Rana Plaza outside the capital last month killed ...
Throughout most of Japan, June is the rainy season. While all that rainfall is great for rice paddies so that we can have delicious new harvest rice in the fall, it makes it a rather dull month for seasonal produce: The summer’s bounty of ...
“I was stopped by two men in a government-registered vehicle, blindfolded and dragged off the street. They took me away to a house in a place I did not know. I was forced into a room with blood all over the walls and floor, ...
Claude Regy says the team at the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) threw him the “best birthday party ever” when he arrived in Japan just days after the actual May 1 occasion. The 90-year-old French director is hoping for an even better birthday gift, ...
As far as debuts go, Shohei Otani's delivered. The celebrated rookie pitched fairly well on Thursday night, and though he finished outside the decision, he left the mound with the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters well within striking distance of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows.
As we wind down on 2007, it’s a good time to look back and see how much the Internet landscape has changed in the last year. Internationally there have been some big shakeups, led by the dramatic effects of the meteoric rise of Facebook ...
With Christmas just around the corner, most Japan Times readers will doubtless have their shopping lists all but completed, with bountiful stockings prepared for all their kith and kin. But what about the rest of us? The lazy ones, the forgetful, the busy or ...
Media distribution methods are changing, and what it brings is not all bad for creators. Over the last year or two, Tokyo-based minimal-techno producer Shane Berry (shaneberry.com) saw online media remolding his industry and set about exploring how he should adapt to deal with ...
It’s a truism that the Japanese are experts at dressing up unpleasantness in cute garb. The ubiquitous cartoon workmen characters bowing in apology at construction zones are meant to make months of jackhammering slightly more bearable. Ditto for robots and the future. With a ...
Product placement within the entertainment industry has become widely accepted as commonplace. You only have to watch “Casino Royale” — the most recent movie in the James Bond series — to see that in-film advertising is big business. From cars and laptop computers to ...
Everyone knows the iconic image of the DJ — the permanently worn headphones, satchel full of vinyl, twin Technics 1200 turntables — but that could all be about to change with iPod Battle Tokyo: The Clash this Friday, where nine DJ teams will fight ...
You’ve heard the stories: The music industry is in crisis, CD sales are dropping year on year, iTunes is taking over the world, the future is digital, the revolution is here. While a lot of this may be true, music fans could be forgiven ...
The Internet is a wonderful thing. By firing up your computer and jacking it into a wall socket, you have instant access to millions of pages of information. You can learn about any subject under the sun, share your knowledge with others, market your ...
Honda’s humanoid robot Asimo is so amazingly graceful for a machine that it’s hard to believe there isn’t a man inside that walking spacesuit. In the 1980s, engineers at the automaker began with a pair of mechanical legs and a dream of creating a ...
“Robots will become the Ford Model T of the 21st century,” says Japanese scientist Hirohisa Hirukawa. If the car that put America on wheels is any guide, robots will have a revolutionary effect on people’s everyday lives. They have already transformed manufacturing industries around ...
This year’s Tokyo Game Show was supposed to be bigger, but that doesn’t mean the industry event was better. It was expanded from three days (one press, two public days) to four days (two press, two public) as Sony, Microsoft and third-party video game ...
Since 1984, Transformers has proven an immensely enduring toy brand, spawning a hugely popular TV series (which in turn spawned even more spinoff TV series), a couple of movies and ever more toys, right up to the present day. In fact, the toys have ...