In his Olympic year, Oscar Pistorius steadily became an avid firearms collector, joining a gun-collecting club and purchasing a collection of firearms that included a .500 Magnum pistol and a civilian version of a military assault rifle.
When it comes to gender equality, Japan has never failed to disappoint.
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, ...
Manchester United's Shinji Kagawa is back with a bang, becoming the first Asian player to score a hat trick in the English Premier League.
Road traffic in Japan is a complicated affair. Apart from those narrow, crooked streets that sometimes end without warning, you have to get used to unclear right-of-way rules and the national fetish for backward parking.
In last month’s column, I looked at the origins of several famous Japanese product brands. Thinking back, perhaps the very ...
I was talking to a joshikōsei (女子高生, high school girl) friend of mine (yes, I’m fully aware of this exalted ...
This story is concerned with money, vast sums of it, amounts quite beyond most people’s imagination. The operative word is chō (兆, trillion).
Last year I went to Yumenoshima Park in Tokyo’s Koto Ward to see a museum housing the 第五福竜丸 (Dai-go Fukuryu Maru, aka No. 5 Lucky Dragon), the ill-fated fishing boat that inadvertently sailed too close to a 水爆実験 (suibaku jikken, thermonuclear test) at Bikini ...
Did you have a hatsuyume (初夢, first dream of the new year) and did it involve hebi (蛇, snakes)? If the answer is yes to both, omedetō gozaimasu, you've hit the jackpot.
Toward the end of every year, Japan’s print media and many business organizations look back on “hit products” whose successes helped define consumer spending over the previous 12 months. The term hitto shōhin (hit products) is credited to the 日経流通新聞 (Nikkei Ryutsu Shimbun, Nikkei ...
December’s election aftermath offered a good chance to learn synonyms for “crushing defeat” and “overwhelming victory.” Taihai (大敗, great defeat), kanpai (完敗, total defeat) — not to be confused with kanpai! (乾杯, cheers!) — kaimetsutekina haiboku (壊滅的な敗北, annihilating defeat), zanpai (惨敗, crushing defeat), rekishitekina ...
If there’s one thing to be sure of in Japan these days, it’s that by the end of the year you will have a prime minister different from the one you started out with. This year was the sixth year in succession to follow ...
The scene: England, Boxing Day 2012. The archetypical Carters are relaxing after a cold turkey lunch (with bread sauce) and are watching the Royal Family’s latest sonnets being read on the goggle-box. Time for a game! “‘Scrabble’?” “No, it always becomes ‘Squabble’!” “‘Monopoly’?” “No, ...
Bad news on the kekkon sensen (結婚戦線, marriage front) — hardly anyone’s doing it. According to a government survey, more than 60 percent of single men and close to 50 percent of single women are not in relationships, nor are they particularly interested in ...
While hamming it up before the TV cameras on a diving board last September, entertainer “Sugi-chan” (real name: Eiji Sugiyama) suffered a fractured thoracic vertebrae. Wild, right? Or as the chunky 39-year-old entertainer — easily recognizable in his blue denim shirt with cutoff sleeves ...
On Nov. 16 Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda shūin wo kaisan shita (衆院を解散した, dissolved the Diet’s Lower House). In August he had promised to do it “chikai uchi ni” (「近いうちに」”soon”). The term is elastic and the governing Minshuto (民主党, Democratic Party of Japan, DPJ) stretched ...
When I was a wee lad of 4 or 5, I would sneak up on a chair and explore my grandfather’s desk, atop of which was situated a curious object: a paperweight featuring the famous three wise monkeys of Nikko. At its base was ...
Among other things, being Japanese means embracing a distinct and particular weirdness. The Japanese are well aware of this fact, and generations of Nipponjin (日本人, Japanese) have pondered on how hen (変, strange) we are since the country opened its doors to outsiders some ...
