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DRIZZLE/RAIN
Farmers in the city of Tamura, Fukushima Prefecture, have begun planting rice in a district once designated a no-go zone because of radioactive fallout ejected by the disaster-hit Fukushima No. 1 power plant.
Recently I was asked to write a blurb for a new liquid plant-nutrient. As soon as I saw the name of the product, 早根早起 （Hayane Hayaoki), I smiled at this example of linguistic creativity.
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 ...
Denmark’s Emmelie de Forest won this year’s Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday night with her ethno-inspired flute and drum tune “Only Teardrops,” despite tough competition from spectacular stage shows by performers from Azerbaijan and Ukraine. Juries and television viewers across Europe awarded the barefoot, ...
One team’s quest for a first title has ended. The other team’s fight will continue next season. The Yokohama B-Corsairs outplayed the Rizing Fukuoka in Sunday’s bj-league championship game, controlling the tempo for larger stretches and making enough timely baskets to fill an instructional ...
Google Glass is the latest mobile Internet gadget to grab headlines. Resembling a pair of glasses, the futuristic device enables wearers to access the Internet — in particular Google’s search, maps and translation functions — as long as they have a Wifi or Bluetooth connection. The mini computer screen that ...
The news that a few jokers in Texas calling themselves Defense Distributed have succeeded in creating a working handgun using ...
The Chinese name their years after animals — the year of the goat, the rat and so on. In the ...
On Tuesday, April 23, a tweet from Associated Press (AP) revealed startling news. There had been explosions in the White House and Obama had been injured. The tweet was a hoax — the AP Twitter account had been hacked via a clever phishing exploit ...
In 1975, a computer scientist named Fred Brooks published one of the seminal texts in the literature of computing. It had the intriguing title of “The Mythical Man-Month” and it consisted simply of a set of essays on the art of managing large software ...
Game otaku rejoice! A bounty of treasures is available while limited-edition supplies last, from commemorative figurines to superkawaii retro backpacks.
There must be very few homes in the developed world that don’t have a television, and Japan is no exception. Even in the Internet era, as terrestrial TV is slowly being replaced by networked TVs, cable channels and computers, regular TV broadcasting still makes ...
Infectious diseases, says the World Health Organization, “are caused by pathogenic microorganisms, such as bacteria, viruses, parasites or fungi; the diseases can be spread, directly or indirectly, from one person to another.” Quite so. Just like Facebook addiction, which also spreads from person to ...
LG’s Optimus G Pro gets a Japan release Customers on NTT Docomo’s network recently received another attractive Android smartphone option in LG’s Optimus G Pro, which launched early this month. Interestingly, the Japanese version of the handset is marginally smaller than the one that ...
Among the many unpleasant discoveries made by those who stashed their cash in Cypriot banks is that the island’s government could stop them moving their money elsewhere. Capital controls are supposed to be a thing of the past, a figment of the pre-globalized world. ...
Australian author Bruce Chatwin has a lot to answer for. Specifically, he's responsible for a forthcoming initial public offering (IPO) on the Italian stock market. It all goes back to something he wrote in his 1986 book "The Songlines."
Washington poet and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller insists there is a difference between his poem “Before Hip Hop” when it is shown like this: Before Hip Hop there was Nat King Cole Sugar Ray and Miles. Cool was how you held a cigarette ...
On March 18, amid great hoopla, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering was awarded to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, Louis Pouzin and Marc Andreessen. The 15-person selection panel said the five men had all contributed to the recent revolution in communications ...
The Nintendo Wii U, which was released late last year, is outfitted with a near communication field (NCF) reader, and the first game to make use of it is the upcoming, downloadable Wii U title, “Pokemon Scramble U.”
Apple Inc. has been always loved by people in Japan. Even during its toughest years, in the 1990s, after cofounder Steve Jobs had been expelled and the company was almost dead, its Macintosh computer held a much greater market share in Japan than in ...