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 ...
The thermometer inside the brewing facility at Shimazaki Shuzo registered a chilly 8 degrees. Like everyone else who had signed up to take part in the final sake-making session of the Karasuyama Taiken (www.karasuyama-taiken.jp), I was dressed for work — in a thin white ...
Every holiday has its meal, and in Japan at Christmas it’s takeaway crispy chicken that rules the roost. For faithful, joyful and triumphant vegetarians in Japan, however, the roasted holiday bird is as appealing as the piece of coal left at the bottom of ...
If Christmas is the time when adults pander to their inner child, then it is holiday season all year round at Papabubble. Tokyo’s premier purveyor of artisan candies is no ordinary sweet shop: it’s more like a Santa’s grotto — complete with happy toiling ...
Food production in Japan is not in great shape. For decades, rural populations have dwindled and local farmers have been undercut by imports, at both the cheap and luxury ends of the market. Current plans to open up Japan’s famously closed farming market through ...
Chef Shinobu Namae rarely eats at the same restaurant twice. Like a lot of chefs, he spends most of his time in his own kitchen, overseeing lunch and dinner service at L’Effervescence, his Michelin-starred French restaurant in Tokyo’s Aoyama. When he does venture out, ...
The obsession with fresh, seasonal food in Japan extends to things that you may not even think of as having seasons, such as dried flour. Shin-soba-ko (new fall-harvest buckwheat flour, used in soba noodles) is eagerly anticipated every year by Japanese gourmets. While soba ...
In these times of economic hardship and political tension, the Yahoo! Japan Ramen project proves that a humble noodle can help bring people together. The project, launched this summer with the goal of promoting ramen around the world, has completed its first phase: selecting ...
Forget izakaya, soba restaurants and divey Chinese eateries — if you really want to see salarymen in mass munching mode, catch them in their natural habitat at the office shokudō (cafeteria), where colleagues rub shoulders daily over a tray of freshly made rations. Besides ...
How nice does a steaming-hot bowl of soup sound? Not a teacup-sized serving of clear broth or that shocking yellow shot of sodium otherwise known as corn potage, but a hearty, home-style soup that actually doubles as a meal (especially when paired with hearty, ...
Whenever an exciting new restaurant is launched in Tokyo, usually it’s all over the foodie magazines within days. Not so with Flatiron. Though it’s been up and running since September, it’s been flying well under the radar. That is nothing to do with its ...
Autumn in Hokkaido is a comma before the long period of white winter. Autumn’s food season too scurries almost directly from summer to wintry tastes, so here’s a look at how the locals keep warm, starting in November and feasting all the way into ...
On the morning of Nov. 3, the line leading to the entrance of Hibiya Park snaked along the sidewalk and coiled around the corner, several meters from the gate. I was there for the Yamanashi Nouveau wine festival but had assumed that the throngs ...
