President Barack Obama takes the most specific steps of his administration in an attempt to ensure the election of a Democratic-controlled Congress in two years.
It’s a dangerous, unpredictable world. Twice in January Chugoku no gunkan (中国の軍艦, Chinese warships) in the Higashi Shina Kai (東シナ海, East China Sea) challenged Japan’s Kaijo Jieitai (海上自衛隊, Maritime Self Defense Forces, MSDF) patrols in a manner deemed kyōiteki (脅威的, threatening). And on Feb. ...
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 ...
Born the grandson of a once-prosperous textile manufacturer in Urawa, Saitama Prefecture, Naohiko Jinno says that when he was growing up he was told by his mother, over and over again, that money was not important. Now aged 66, and a professor emeritus of ...
On a rainy midwinter day, Taro Yamamoto stood with a small group of people in front of Shimokitazawa Station in Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward and addressed passers-by in that artsy youth-culture hub. “I am an actor — Taro Yamamoto,” he announced. “And I would like ...
The pioneers of the rock ‘n’ roll era on both sides of the Atlantic have now largely faded from the show-business scene — which is hardly surprising, given that those still strutting their stuff are in their 70s and 80s, and even “The King” ...
On Nov. 19, the Pit hall of the New National Theatre, Tokyo, in Shibuya, was filled with hundreds of eager theater-goers. They had come to see a performance of “Onna Goroshi Abura no Jigoku” (“The Women-Killer and the Hell of Oil”), a play written ...
In the last few decades, clinical depression in Japan has emerged from its longstanding obscurity shrouded in shame and guilt to becoming far more openly recognized as a national disease. A 2010 report by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry put the number of ...
Kiyoshi Nakabayashi well remembers how, when he was a high school student in the late 1950s and early ’60s, newspapers were full of stories of violent gang wars being fought out openly on the streets of Tokyo. Most Japanese reacted to those brazen displays ...
Monday, Sept. 19, was Respect for the Aged Day in Japan. But on that sweltering national holiday, it wasn’t the heat that that drew tens of thousands of people to Meiji Park in central Tokyo, but their concerns for all the nation’s citizens, and ...
On Friday, July 22, as the stifling heat and humidity of summer relented for just a fleeting few days, hundreds of people filled a hall at Enkakuji Temple in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, to listen to a lecture by philosophy scholar Alfons Deeken. German-born Deeken, ...
In conversation, Tadanori Yokoo jumps nimbly between the past and the present. One moment he’s watching the sky glow red as bombs rain down on Kobe during World War II. The next he’s riding in a taxi with Yukio Mishima. And then he’s back ...
Considering the current state of Japan’s economy, it’s remarkable to recall that 60 years ago there were hundreds of companies both old and new jockeying restlessly to fill the vacuum left after almost all the nation’s cities were heavily bombed in World War II ...
Fifty-three years ago, Amon Miyamoto was born into a world in which he grew up listening to spirited exchanges between leading lights from the stage and showbiz in his father’s coffee shop across from the modern-leaning Shinbashi Enbujo outpost of the venerable Kabuki-za theater ...
Atsuko Muraki was thrown into the public spotlight in 2009, when she was head of the Equal Employment, Children and Families Bureau at the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry. Back then, Japan’s major news media suddenly started casting her as a lead perpetrator in ...
