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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.
In “The Tempest,” William Shakespeare writes of a human body deep beneath the waves undergoing “a sea-change into something rich and strange,” transmuting into coral and pearls. The Bard’s coinage has come to mean a profound or notable transformation of any sort (now rendered ...
During the 18 years I have been writing this column, few stories have haunted me as much as that about the Japanese-owned incinerator that, for more than a decade, fumigated the U.S. Naval Air Facility at Atsugi in the Kanagawa Prefecture cities of Yamato ...
Negotiators at the COP15 conference in Copenhagen didn’t see eye to eye on much last month, but almost everyone agreed on one thing: To protect the planet we need to save its forests. From Denmark to Japan, where The Japan Times’ Nature page columnist ...
Post-conference analysis of the Copenhagen COP15 has ranged from despair and disgust to guarded optimism that 2010 will bring a new and better agreement. The truth is, Copenhagen was a circus of geopolitical bickering among self- absorbed leaders representing powerful and powerless nations, of ...
Imagine for a minute that global warming is not changing our planet’s biosphere and the ecosystems that sustain life on Earth. Imagine that climate change abetted by rising human-generated emissions of greenhouse gases does not threaten freshwater supplies, agriculture, marine ecosystems, human health, coastal ...
They say that if a frog is dropped into boiling water it will jump out, but if it is placed in water that is then heated slowly it will steadily acclimate and boil to death — having missed its chance to escape. I have ...
While visiting India earlier this month I had a revelation. It wasn’t a burst of enlightenment of the spiritual sort, though India offers those, too. It was a realization about corporate social responsibility that came with the lifting of a misapprehension I have toiled ...
BAR HARBOR MAINE — Each summer, our family visits this part of the New England coast, and each year I am reminded of the elemental connections humans share with the oceans. This summer, though, brought a deeper awareness of the dramatic changes humans are ...
Events this month have brought home to me once again the enduring truth of that popular slogan, “Think globally, act locally.” While watching G8 and G-5 delegates posturing and finger-pointing at the recent summit in Rome, two acquaintances reminded me that real change often ...
The 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer declared: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.” Reading the most recent book by James Gustave Speth, Dean of the Yale University School of ...
Each year on May 5, Japan celebrates Children’s Day with waves of young families flooding local parks, playgrounds and amusement centers. If the swelling crowds and cacophony of cheerful voices are any indication, all is well in Japan. But the numbers tell a different ...
Judging from the last month’s headlines, it’s clear we are collectively still not getting it — despite how much we know about the environment. In fact, it seems the more we know, the less we learn. Here are some examples: — In an effort ...