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Tokyo Skytree will celebrate its first anniversary Wednesday but has not yet completed its prime mission of reliably broadcasting to households in the capital and its suburbs. Since December, the world’s tallest free-standing tower, at 634 meters high, has been making test broadcasts to ...
If you work in an office, you probably spend a fair part of your time sitting at a desk, which, of course, isn’t very healthy. To combat that the Pomodoro technique recommends that you work in intervals with regular breaks — for example, 25 ...
“I was stopped by two men in a government-registered vehicle, blindfolded and dragged off the street. They took me away to a house in a place I did not know. I was forced into a room with blood all over the walls and floor, ...
"Outsider art" is relatively new in Japan and, as a genre, works made by self-taught Japanese artists are still not very well known on the category-delineating, label-loving international art scene.
After all these years, Rafael Nadal still knows how to dominate Roger Federer. In the 30th meeting between the two tennis greats, Nadal controlled the final from start to finish to win 6-1, 6-3 Sunday for his seventh Italian Open title. “Rafa was just ...
When I began writing this column, I thought it would be a one-year gig. My editors thought so too. But things went well, and for nearly four years now I’ve reported in this space about my children’s experiences in Japanese school. I’ve penned more ...
How do you teach a child right from wrong? I certainly don’t have all the answers. In our home, we’re still working on why you can’t hit your brother, even when he’s being deliberately annoying — as he has been all this week, answering ...
When we moved to Japan and enrolled our sons in local schools, both they and I had a lot to learn. Every day was a challenge, and I was so focused on the basics that I missed a lot of things that should have ...
I’m a fan of “Doraemon,” the long-running children’s television show about a blue robot cat from the future, who lives with an average family on the outskirts of Tokyo. The Japanese is relatively easy to understand, and I love Doraemon’s magic pocket, from which ...
I was a little nervous when we went to pick up my son, who was returning from an extended stay in the Japanese countryside. He’s 13, an age when kids go through tremendous physical and emotional changes. There have been days when he was ...
Procreation just ain’t what it used to be. Last month, the Japanese government announced that the nation’s birthrate fell in 2003 to an all-time low of 1.29. The rate, which measures the average number of times a woman gives birth in her lifetime, dropped ...
Just try to find something for foreign kids to do in Japan in the summer. There aren’t many options, even if your children speak Japanese, as mine do. The most difficult period of all is the five or six weeks after international schools close ...
A few weeks ago my younger son came home from school all excited. “Mom! Guess what?” he shouted from the entranceway as he kicked off his shoes. “The ku gave us a gohan buza!” I had been hard at work on an article and ...
My kids generally don’t mind it when I write about them in this column, although on occasion my older son has accused me of exploiting him for professional gain. It happened again when he heard the topic for today’s column. “You’re writing about foreign ...
I recently stumbled across a war story I knew nothing about. I was at the library looking for books to keep my older son reading in Japanese, now that he no longer attends Japanese school. Since he had just made a trip to Hiroshima ...
Why is it so difficult to teach children table manners? My kids are quick learners. My oldest only needs to hear a Weird Al song once and he’s got the lyrics memorized. His little brother can recite the specs for every fighter plane ever ...
“You want us to go to school on our day off?” my 9-year-old cried in disbelief. “Zettai iyada! (Absolutely no way!)” He’s been in Japan since he was 5 and tends to speak in Japanese when he’s riled. “Yeah, leave it to our mother ...