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Pope Francis’ fascination with the devil took on remarkable new twists Tuesday, with a well-known exorcist insisting Francis helped “liberate” a Mexican man possessed by four different demons despite the Vatican’s insistence that no such papal exorcism took place. The case concerns a 43-year-old ...
Kazuhiro Shiraishi, 66, is a guest-house manager in the Izu-kogen Highlands, a famous resort area on the Izu Peninsula of Shizuoka Prefecture. Looking out onto the Pacific Ocean, and just 90 minutes by train from Tokyo, Izu has a warm climate all year round ...
“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, ...
Guitarist Dustin Wong hesitates for a split second. It’s a pause that would go unnoticed during most other sets, but Wong has spent the last 40 minutes seemingly in a trance while playing guitar and looping the notes via an array of pedals in ...
Tim Duncan saves the day as the Spurs hold off the Grizzlies in overtime
On Saturday, Oct. 2, over 2,670 demonstrators carrying Hinomaru Japanese flags marched in Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park to protest the Kan government’s soft handling of a long-running territorial dispute with China over the Senkaku Islands (known in Chinese as Diaoyutai), which was rekindled on Sept. ...
It’s your funeral. What’s your pleasure? Wine funeral? Jazz funeral? Outer space funeral? Internet funeral? “Natural” funeral, in which your ashes mingle with the ocean waves or fertilize and therefore in a sense become, say, a blossoming cherry tree under which, come spring, your ...
Mr. Sakamoto, a sales team leader at an IT systems company, got off to a rocky start when he was transferred to his current office. At the first meeting with his underlings, all in their 30s, the 43-year-old boss detected a tense atmosphere. So ...
Shock, gasp, horror. Aya Hirano is not a virgin. Wait, there are larger issues involved. But first, Aya. She’s the voice of Haruhi Suzumiya, heroine of the anime series of the same name, and as such an idol to thousands if not millions of ...
“The destiny of a nation depends on the manner in which it feeds itself,” wrote French epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) in his famous treatise, “The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy.” If Brillat-Savarin were living today, one wonders what he might say ...
Slow Life Japan is a sort of movement, or rather an antimovement, that sprouted here and there in the 1990s, little islands of quietude amid the ultra-fast life that had come to seem as unquestionable as modernity itself. Production, consumption, growth, activity, exhaustion — ...
Japan may be in the midst of a silent epidemic of kinketsu-byo (“lack of money disease”). The source of the infection is a new statute that bans many borrowers from obtaining unsecured loans. While the full repercussions of the revised Money Lending Business Law ...
Learn to speak English, or else! That’s the message for employees of Internet services company Rakuten, Inc. Back in May, the company announced plans to adopt English as the company’s official language by 2012. That means all meetings and communications within the company would ...
A series of articles in the Aug. 1 edition of The Big Issue Japan, a biweekly magazine sold by homeless people, is addressed “to adults who have never known war.” Few major powers, past or present, can equal Japan in that regard. Sixty-five years ...
“Created in response to deep popular needs, the legendary hero survives long after his death. . . . While the positive aspects of the hero’s life and character come to be emphasized (or even created out of whole cloth), less attractive features are passed ...
Why isn’t this Utopia? Why, given material and technological advantages beyond the wildest dreams of our most visionary ancestors, are we floundering in a sea of despair? Well, let’s call it “depression.” The weekly magazine Shukan Toyo Keizai (July 24) devotes no fewer than ...
Differences in familiarity with computers are creating ever-wider gaps within the ranks of Japan’s salarymen. Evening tabloid Nikkan Gendai (July 17) reports on the emergence of a new type of person at companies who never stops typing on his PC, even while being spoken ...