Transport authorities launched a full-fledged investigation Sunday into the derailment of a bullet train on the Akita Shinkansen Line in Daisen, Akita Prefecture, on Saturday afternoon.
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
“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 ...
“If only we might fall Like cherry blossoms in the spring — So pure and radiant !” Quoted by historian ...
Two natural facts have had a disproportionate impact on Japanese culture: cherry blossoms are beautiful, and they fall. Cherry blossoms, ...
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 ...
Teruo Saito has lived most of his 79 years within a couple of hundred meters of the Pacific, in an area that has been overwhelmed by massive tsunamis twice in the last 600 years. Until last year’s Great East Japan Earthquake, the retired company ...
As a young documentary filmmaker, Ayako Imamura had been wrestling with feelings of emptiness. Deaf since birth, the 32-year-old Nagoya native has shot about 30 short films documenting the lives of deaf people in Japan since 2000. But at one point in her career, ...
In a YouTube clip from February 2011, Hiromi Ito begins a reading of an excerpt from her narrative poem “I Am Anjuhimeko (Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru)” at the Museum of Modern Aomori Literature by banging the palm of her hand loudly and repeatedly ...
Peter Watts, co-chair of the Australian Nuclear Free Alliance, was recently in Japan as one of some 100 speakers at the Global Conference for a Nuclear Power Free World held in Yokohama on Jan. 14 and 15. During an interview with The Japan Times, ...
“Why do we have to aim for the world’s No. 1 — what’s wrong with being the world’s No. 2?” Ever since that short question about Japan’s vaunted K computer was posed live on national television in November 2009, Japan’s policymakers have been haunted ...
The moment Hideaki Fujitani unlocks the heavy door and enters the room, the buzzing noise — which sounded like a simple hum from the outside — gets much louder. “The noise is from the cooling fans,” he shouts as he tries to tidy up ...
