In his Olympic year, Oscar Pistorius steadily became an avid firearms collector, joining a gun-collecting club and purchasing a collection of firearms that included a .500 Magnum pistol and a civilian version of a military assault rifle.
When it comes to gender equality, Japan has never failed to disappoint.
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, ...
Manchester United's Shinji Kagawa is back with a bang, becoming the first Asian player to score a hat trick in the English Premier League.
For Yuji Hoshino, mushrooms were a way of life. The 50-year-old farmer grew up watching his father raise shiitake mushrooms on their land at the foot of the mountains in Sano, southern Tochigi Prefecture. Later, he became the one to yearly cut about 15,000 ...
Petri Artturi Asikainen would regularly accost strangers in Tokyo, on the streets, in parks or bars and on trains. With a high-end Nikon D3 digital SLR in his hands, the lanky and bespectacled Finn would ask — somewhat timidly summoning one of the few ...
Yoshio Otsuka’s years of striving to revive a near-extinct strain of turnip known to have been grown some 400 years ago in the Shinagawa district of today’s central Tokyo recently struck pay dirt in a most unexpected fashion. That’s because, via a little local ...
In the upstairs meeting room of a camping lodge in Komagane, Nagano Prefecture, two women and about 20 men walked slowly and intently in circles one rainy day last November. At the front of the room, a weathered and wiry Englishman intoned the sort ...
‘March 11, 2011 — We will never forget the day. The disaster … After the massive earthquake occurred, the huge tsunami destroyed this area. Many citizens were lost and the survived people also received the deep crack in their hearts. I had a narrow ...
As the sun sets over a small patch of the Nippori district of Tokyo’s northeastern Arakawa Ward, people can often be seen stopping to gaze to the West — something not so surprising atop a street named Fujimizaka, which means “Mount Fuji Viewing Slope.” ...
The following is a further excerpt from Teiichi Sato’s book, “The Seed of Hope in the Heart.” People’s accounts that Sato records here about the huge tsunami triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, were all told to him first-hand ...
The whistle blows and Kristina “Ragin’ Redhead” Owens Hawkins, a jammer for the Yokosuka Sushi Rollers roller derby team, darts quickly as she approaches an aggressive pack of blockers. She scans for a weak spot between two ladies in the back. She spots a ...
What’s green, fuzzy and has a starring role in Japan’s national anthem? And no, it’s not Kermit the Frog, who wasn’t around when the lyrics for “Kimigayo” are thought to have been penned, sometime in the 9th century. The answer is moss — the ...
Lake Kasumigaura in Ibaraki Prefecture is facing an environmental threat that has essentially turned it into a time bomb ticking away 60 km northeast of Tokyo. Experts warn that Japan’s second largest lake with a surface area of 220 sq. km is quietly but ...
Like a child eagerly trying to win some trading cards during a playground huddle, I scrunch up my fingers behind my back before unleashing my hand in time-honored fashion with the Japanese phrase: “Saisho wa gu, janken … pon!” Me: paper. Opponent: scissors. Result: ...
Self-styled “sex helper” Shingo Sakatsume has lost count of the abuses he claims the media and the authorities have heaped on him. At first, after graduating in sociology from the University of Tokyo and freelancing as a “listening-and-talking” person with the often-lonely elderly, he’d ...
