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RAIN
Farmers in the city of Tamura, Fukushima Prefecture, have begun planting rice in a district once designated a no-go zone because of radioactive fallout ejected by the disaster-hit Fukushima No. 1 power plant.
Recently I was asked to write a blurb for a new liquid plant-nutrient. As soon as I saw the name of the product, 早根早起 （Hayane Hayaoki), I smiled at this example of linguistic creativity.
Life in Japan just seems tailor-made for certain foreign residents, who slip into the fabric of this society as smoothly as a hand slides into a glove. American Curtis Patterson, a professional koto player and music teacher, is a case in point. Not only ...
Denmark’s Emmelie de Forest won this year’s Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday night with her ethno-inspired flute and drum tune “Only Teardrops,” despite tough competition from spectacular stage shows by performers from Azerbaijan and Ukraine. Juries and television viewers across Europe awarded the barefoot, ...
One team’s quest for a first title has ended. The other team’s fight will continue next season. The Yokohama B-Corsairs outplayed the Rizing Fukuoka in Sunday’s bj-league championship game, controlling the tempo for larger stretches and making enough timely baskets to fill an instructional ...
Outside of comic books, when you are exposed to radiation, your DNA is damaged and you get ill. Sometimes very ill: just witness the terrible effects of the radiation released in the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 20 years ago. But if only life were like ...
Some people complain that Japanese people don’t laugh enough, that Japanese society today is too strait-laced. Are the Japanese too serious, too stressed? Perhaps they are — but aren’t we all? In any case, Japanese has an awful lot of onomatopoeic words describing laughter. ...
Good news this week for believers in common sense, opponents of intelligent design, and, incidentally, for writers of columns about natural selection. First, Japanese volunteers have helped to provide evidence that natural selection has been tinkering with our genetic makeup far more recently than ...
The year 2005 was when, shockingly, “intelligent design” almost got on the syllabuses of American science classes. But then 11 rational parents in Pennsylvania took their school board to court, and, just before Christmas, the presiding judge delivered a crushing verdict. Judge John Jones ...
Here’s a rhetorical question that isn’t just an excuse to talk about something rude. Would you men out there rather have large gonads or large brains? For female readers, how about this: What do you think is most important in a male, testes size ...
Want to have huge muscles but are too lazy to go to the gym? There could soon be a way. In 2004, a young German boy was taken to the doctor by his mother, a former sprinter. At age 3, the boy was already ...
As futurists get excited by the prospect of engineering ourselves to have longer lives, it’s easy to forget that, as well as the high-tech ways, there are very simple ways to live longer. People in the Mediterranean, who are renowned for their health despite ...
Someone asked me the other day if I wouldn’t like to be a woman, just to see what it was like. Sure, I’d love to try it, I said, for a day or two. Imagine seeing the world from the other side, seeing how ...
Natural selection these days can be more than a little unnatural, especially in Japan, which has a curious relationship with nature. The country has maintained an enviable proportion of natural forest cover — by importing the wood it needs from tropical forests, largely in ...
In the 1960s, Toshisada Nishida, of Kyoto University, set up a long-term research project in the Mahale Mountains of Tanzania. His aim was to study our closest relatives in the wild. His work, and that of Jane Goodall, whose field site was some 170 ...
One of the strongest memories I have of a trip to Hiroshima that I made a few years ago is of the shadow on the steps of the Sumitomo Bank. Someone had been sitting on those steps, probably waiting for the bank to open, ...
Whatever your job and background, drunken conversations between work colleagues have much in common. However, a phrase that I often heard in Japan but have heard nowhere else is, “I have an inactive form of aldehyde dehydrogenase.” Drunken biologists we might have been, but ...