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P/CLOUDY
NTT DoCoMo Inc., despite being Japan’s biggest mobile phone carrier, has been struggling against tough smartphone competition from KDDI Corp. and Softbank Corp., which is leading in that area. But one edge that the cellphone behemoth — it has more than 60 million subscribers ...
Throughout most of Japan, June is the rainy season. While all that rainfall is great for rice paddies so that we can have delicious new harvest rice in the fall, it makes it a rather dull month for seasonal produce: The summer’s bounty of ...
If you don’t get into the ring once or twice, then you’re a coward, Geoffrey Ima says as he describes people’s attitudes toward boxing in his hometown in Uganda. Ima has been in the ring hundreds of times and came to love boxing so ...
Claude Regy says the team at the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) threw him the “best birthday party ever” when he arrived in Japan just days after the actual May 1 occasion. The 90-year-old French director is hoping for an even better birthday gift, ...
The 27-year-old defender says he was ready for a change of scenery after helping Sanfrecce Hiroshima win theJ. League title last season.
Recently I was asked to write a blurb for a new liquid plant-nutrient. As soon as I saw the name of the product, 早根早起 （Hayane Hayaoki), I smiled at this example of linguistic creativity.
This bilingual thing … they say that it’s a both curse and a blessing. Watakushigotode kyōshukudesuga (私事で恐縮ですが, A thousand pardons ...
The media and kyōiku senmonka (教育専門家, pundits on education) have been voicing the pros and cons of the idea put ...
Beauty must be a bilingual thing. At least that’s the impression one gets from looking at signs outside hairdressers, beauty parlors and similar types of businesses in Japan.
I dial a number and ask to speak to my literary agent, Mr. Suzuki. “Moshi-moshi. Suzuki Masatoshi-sama oraremasuka?” “Sumimasen ga, okyakusama wa?” Literally “Excuse me, as for the guest?” That is the speaker’s polite way of asking “Who should I say is calling?” “Shuraibā ...
I was one of those suckers who thought that the seifu (政府, government) might get it right this time.
On March 16, the platforms for the Tokyu Toyoko Line at Shibuya Station moved from the chijō nikai (地上二階, second floor) to the chika gokai (地下五階, fifth basement floor) to connect the Toyoko Line with the Tokyo Metro Fukutoshin Line.
The man from next door says it. My mother-in-law says it. The guy in the grocery store says it. The nurse on TV says it. Seems like everyone says Yoisho! (よいしょ!) It’s one of those expressions that appear to be a common part of ...
“Mami,” I said, reading the kanji 「真実」tattooed on the bicep of the young man seated beside me last December, aboard a flight bound for Houston, Texas. “Is that the name of your Japanese girlfriend?” The mélange of emotions displayed on his face — a ...
It’s that time of year when the Japanese turn their thoughts to what I call the 3-S’s: sakura (桜, cherry blossoms), sakamori (酒盛り, drinking parties) and shuran (酒乱, getting raucously drunk). Fifty weeks out of the year we’re our dull, proper, work-addicted selves, but ...
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.
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 first brand I noticed here was a confectioner named 文明堂 (Bunmeido). The company, a 老舗 (shinise, well-established shop), was founded in Nagasaki in 1900, ...
I was talking to a joshikōsei (女子高生, high school girl) friend of mine (yes, I’m fully aware of this exalted position) and she told me that these days in sociology class, Japanese teens are taught that by the time they start paying taxes, the ...
This story is concerned with money, vast sums of it, amounts quite beyond most people’s imagination. The operative word is chō (兆, trillion).