The involvement of architects in redeveloping the many towns and cities affected by March 11′s Great East Japan Earthquake and the resulting tsunami is not as common as might be expected. Rather, local governments are primarily partnering for such work with civil engineering firms. ...

In late July, when the students of Osaka Institute of Technology’s Department of Architecture first arrived at the tiny port of Oharahama, an air of negativity hung over the conversation of the locals. “They were full of questions: Why did this have to happen ...

Shigeyoshi Osaki can read the minds of spiders. Or so you would think, if you see the way he handles the eight-legged arthropods. Osaki, professor at the department of biomacromolecules at Nara Medical University in the city of Kashihara, Nara Prefecture, is also one ...

French-Canadian Alex Paille came to Japan in 2006 to teach English, study martial arts and try his hand as a manga artist. His artistic drive took a new direction when one of his English students turned out to be internationally renowned filmmaker Sion Sono ...

Watching the two whirling dancers’ straw skirts aflame as they kept their balance under elaborate, 4-meter-high headdresses while circumambulating the central shrine of the village to the beat of drummers amid a buzzing throng, I did not expect a nudge from the local standing ...

This is the traditional season for the Keralan festival called Onam, the one time a year when the mythical King Mahabali leaves the netherworld where he now rules and visits his people to help them celebrate the harvest and their traditions. It is a ...

In the early hours of March 28, 1979, human errors and mechanical failures combined to cause a cooling system to stop working at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. One of the station’s two nuclear cores overheated, thrusting the plant ...

In Japan, studying English is, and has long been, a perpetual mission for many people, and there is no shortage of books, DVDs and schools touting newer, better, quicker and easier ways to master the global language. Takehiko Kikuchi, a 52-year-old English teacher who ...

Nestled in the upmarket Wada district of Tokyo’s Suginami Ward, Renkoji Temple is a model of gentility. On weekday mornings, pensioners sit and sketch its prayer hall while housewives chat quietly in the shade of its well-tended trees. Given this setting, it would be ...

Hiroko Kumagai will never forget the day in 1998 when she first stepped inside the red-brick building at the entrance to the closed and shuttered Miyahara shaft in the Miike coal mine in Omuta, Fukuoka Prefecture. “I felt I heard the voices of people ...

The crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11 has revealed the danger posed by the storing of spent nuclear fuel in pools at the plant, because after the pools drained ...