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 year. ...
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 ...
In the wake of the tragic earthquake and subsequent tsunami last Friday, people in Japan — and indeed all over the world — have been scrambling to sort through the news in search of information they can trust. In the first few hours after ...
When Kinect, Microsoft’s latest add-on for the Xbox 360 game console, was released worldwide in November 2010, it was the beginning of a success story, but not in the way Microsoft may have been expecting. The peripheral, which uses a camera and motion-capture software ...
If 2010 was supposed to be 3-D’s coming-out party, then in 2011 the party is poised to continue as manufacturers do their best to make this trendy technology truly stick. While 3-D can be an incredibly enjoyable, and visually stunning, form of entertainment, there’s ...
As 2010 draws to a close, smartphone use in Japan has risen to an all-time high, accounting for around 50 percent of all handset sales here. Yet it shames this columnist to admit that I’m still rockin’ an old Windows 6.1 phone — insofar ...
In 1990, Jun Murai, at the time an associate professor at Keio University in Tokyo, made a prediction in an article in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. When asked what the future of computer systems would look like, he described a world where, on one ...
I magine you live in a house that communicates with you through an interface resembling the futuristic info-graphics in the science-fiction movie “Minority Report” — where actor Tom Cruise interacted with icons on an holographic touch screen. For example, a kitchen appliance, such as ...
The iPhone’s popularity in Japan is cracking open an industry long thought inaccessible to outsiders. For years, the typical Japanese cell phone — built to operate on a network hardly used anywhere else in the world — has been stuffed with quirky games and ...
Alicia Keys and Lady Gaga take charity work seriously, and they’re going offline to prove it. Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Usher and other celebrities have joined a new campaign called Digital Life Sacrifice on behalf of Keys’ charity, Keep a Child Alive. The entertainers plan ...
Remember CCCD? Probably not, unless you collect outdated acronyms. Between 2002 and 2004 many Japanese record companies released copy-controlled compact discs, aka CCCDs. Tracks from such CDs could not be burned onto PCs or copied onto portable devices such as mp3 players. But consumers ...
Another motion controller, another sports game. It didn’t take game developers long to follow the lead set by Nintendo’s Wii and create games for the new PlayStation 3 Move and Xbox 360 Kinect add-ons that revolve around throwing, batting, putting or lobbing things. And ...
“While making the first and second games in the series, I went drinking in Kabukicho with (Toshihiro) Nagoshi, the overall producer of the franchise, two or three nights every week,” says Masayoshi Kikuchi, a veteran producer at Sega, as we discuss the latest entries ...
Advertising networks that gather unsold commercial space from popular online destinations and then resell them at a discount are part of a multibillion-dollar industry that is only in its infancy in Japan. Although early adopters of the technology have a huge potential for profits, ...
