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Silvio Berlusconi has failed in his attempt to topple the Italian government, leaving him weaker than ever and zapping the aura of invincibility that has surrounded him for two decades as he faces the possible loss of his Senate seat and a ban from ...
Hatsudai has a lot going for it. This quiet low-rise residential neighborhood just minutes west of Shinjuku boasts a friendly traditional shōtengai (shopping street) and a lively annual Awa Odori dance festival. Now add to that a really outstanding restaurant. Anis opened in early ...
International events undermine Japan's democracy. Shame on the International Olympic Committee for being a party to it.
In the glitzy and gossipy world of Japanese celebrity, hardly a week goes by without revelations being made about — or made by — Ichikawa Ebizo XI. For years, the charismatic young star of the kabuki world has never long been out of the ...
Reigning champion Kei Nishikori made quick work of Feliciano Lopez, walloping the Spaniard in a straight-sets victory Thursday to reach the quarterfinals of the Rakuten Japan Open. The world No. 13 Nishikori needed little over an hour to put away Lopez, 7-6 (7-4), 6-0 ...
Masumi Kuwata has spent most of his life in the spotlight of stardom and publicity. As one of Japan’s all-time outstanding baseball stars, with a 23-year professional career behind him, this 42-year-old from Osaka Prefecture began capturing headlines at the tender age of 15 ...
For the last several years, Benesse Art Site on the island of Naoshima in the Seto Inland Sea has featured prominently in rankings of Japan’s best tourist destinations. The publisher Rough Guides, for example, ranks the Kagawa Prefecture island’s hotel and two art museums ...
“I want to tell you a real love story,” whispers a pen-wielding Misako, a graphic-novel version of comic artist Misako Takashima, on the first page of the 2007 book, “Rock and Roll Love.” “It was my first love story,” she adds coyly. So begins ...
Renho, a first-term Upper House member from the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, shot to stardom in Japan last November when, as a member of a government committee tasked with screening ministries’ budget requests, she had several fierce, face-to-face battles with bureaucrats. While the ...
Mika Tsutsumi is a spirited journalist and writer whose work turns a spotlight on the widespread hardships and poverty caused by official policies and the behavior of businesses in the United States. Her best-selling book “Rupo Hinkon Taikoku Amerika” (“America, the Poverty Superpower”) exposed ...
In July 1942, seven months after the attack on Pearl Harbor that started the Pacific War, Tokyo hosted one of the most ambitious exhibitions of art the world had ever seen. “Leonardo da Vinci,” staged in an exhibition hall in the central district of ...
I will never forget the day I went to a show titled “Embracing Asia: Taeko Tomiyama Retrospective 1950-2009,” which was one of 370 art exhibits by creators from 40 countries comprising the fourth Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial staged over 50 days last autumn at locations ...
Author Joshua “Jake” Adelstein supposes that if he’d stayed home in rural Missouri and had never come to Japan, he’d probably have become a small-town lawyer or a very happy detective on the local police force. “I was always attracted to the law, probably ...
Author Joshua “Jake” Adelstein supposes that if he’d stayed home in rural Missouri and had never come to Japan, he’d probably have become a small-town lawyer or a very happy detective on the local police force. “I was always attracted to the law, probably ...
Psychiatrist Rika Kayama is an outspoken doctor specializing in mental illness, a best-selling writer and a popular social commentator. Her latest book, “Shigamitsukanai Ikikata” (“A Way of Life in Which You Don’t Cling to Anything”), has sold 422,000 copies since it was published in ...
Susan Schmidt is a former editor at the University of Tokyo Press who spent 20 years living and raising a family in Japan up until the mid-1990s. She is now executive director of the U.S.-based, 1,500-member Alliance of Associations of Teachers of Japanese — ...
When future historians document the story of Japanese space exploration, 2009 will likely figure as the year when the nation put two high-profile rocket launch failures, in 1999 and 2003, firmly behind it and, quite literally, took off. In June, the nation’s first blueprint ...