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Pope Francis’ fascination with the devil took on remarkable new twists Tuesday, with a well-known exorcist insisting Francis helped “liberate” a Mexican man possessed by four different demons despite the Vatican’s insistence that no such papal exorcism took place. The case concerns a 43-year-old ...
Kazuhiro Shiraishi, 66, is a guest-house manager in the Izu-kogen Highlands, a famous resort area on the Izu Peninsula of Shizuoka Prefecture. Looking out onto the Pacific Ocean, and just 90 minutes by train from Tokyo, Izu has a warm climate all year round ...
“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, ...
Guitarist Dustin Wong hesitates for a split second. It’s a pause that would go unnoticed during most other sets, but Wong has spent the last 40 minutes seemingly in a trance while playing guitar and looping the notes via an array of pedals in ...
Tim Duncan saves the day as the Spurs hold off the Grizzlies in overtime
One of the original long-distance paved U.S. Highways, Route 66 always had about it an aura of romance born of wide-open horizons and travel on it that spanned not just a country, but a continent. Then, during the 1930s, it became the major and ...
In what was the second season of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tokyo since the German car-maker crucially stepped in as lead sponsor when government funding dried up last year, 37 brands presented their collections for the 2012-13 fall/winter season from March 18 to 23. So, ...
“If I were asked to explain the Japanese spirit, I would say it is wild cherry blossoms glowing in the morning sun!” — Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), nativist thinker and poet The cherry blossom is not just another pretty flower. Pause to consider, as you ...
“If only we might fall Like cherry blossoms in the spring — So pure and radiant !” Quoted by historian Ivan Morris in “The Nobility of Failure,” 1975 World War II transfigured the cherry blossom. The 22-year-old kamikaze pilot who composed that haiku shortly ...
Two natural facts have had a disproportionate impact on Japanese culture: cherry blossoms are beautiful, and they fall. Cherry blossoms, wrote the scholar-poet and shogunal mandarin Matsudaira Sadanobu (1758-1828), “seem especially suited to the ways of our country, with branches so gentle, flowers so ...
When five shell-pink buds open together on a particular tree in the precincts of Yasukuni Shrine in central Tokyo, the city explodes with the joy of spring. The cherry-blossom season has officially begun! But the crowded picnics beneath the graceful Somei-Yoshino trees are only ...
Though he died by his own hand at the age of 35, novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s accomplishments were such that, even after so brief a writing career, Japan’s most prestigious literary accolade — the Akutagawa Prize — now bears his name. As well as being ...
At just over 25 meters from stem to stern, and 140 tons, the wooden long-line tuna-fishing boat Daigo Fukuryu Maru (No. 5 Lucky Dragon) is hardly imposing. Yet despite its diminutive size for an ocean-going vessel, in March 1954 the Lucky Dragon’s encounter with ...
What do nuclear power plants and Shinto shrines have in common? For a start, they tend to be hidden from view — the former in remote coastal locations, the latter behind stands of trees or atop hills or mountains. They are also sources of ...
The Ground Self-Defense Force troops have gone. So too the old blackboard with sheets of paper taped to it. I still remember a few of the names written in long lists there — the names of those whose muddied bodies could be identified after ...
The first anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake is a time to commemorate the victims of that terrible tragedy. But it is also an opportunity to look to the future. How will the events of March 11, 2011 — and the subsequent ongoing ...
