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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
“Kazoku Game (The Family Game),” directed by the late Yoshimitsu Morita and released in 1983, remains a movie milestone. A cynical black comedy, it presented to the world a distillation of the less edifying social outcomes of Japan’s postwar economic miracle. The Numata family are invaded by a private tutor ...
Why do people disagree? It seems a stupid question. Maybe it is. Or maybe not. Let us assume, for the ...
Two weeks ago, Tokyo Governor Naoki Inose gave an interview to the New York Times in which he violated International ...
On May 1, Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs announced it had received notification that Mount Fuji had been recommended for World Heritage status by the UNESCO-affiliated International Council on Monuments and Sites. Formal approval is expected at the World Heritage Committee meeting in Cambodia ...
Let us pause for a moment to consider … the kiss. So simple a gesture; so overpowering, sometimes, the effect. Who doesn’t remember his or her first kiss — and remember it with pleasure? First sex can be a painful memory; a first kiss ...
On April 15, two alleged terrorists in Boston killed three people, injured more than 170 others and terrified a nation — for about $100 it cost them to modify pressure cookers into bombs. We should be glad they didn’t come to Japan, where they ...
The Liberal Democratic Party has a thing for archery. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s financial policies comprise “three arrows.” The symbolism is based on the old Japanese saying, “Three arrows are harder to break.” Since “Abenomics” has proven to be a PR success, at least ...
Japanese television networks are scrambling into Asia, seeing it as a new frontier of business opportunities as they struggle with dwindling advertising revenue at home. Fuji Media Holdings. is pushing into the Asian market with its “Asia Versus” program, a competition for amateur musicians. ...
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s April 19 National Press Club speech about boosting women’s participation in the workforce has been covered extensively in the domestic and foreign media since it signals a sea change in the Liberal Democratic Party’s view of women’s role in society. ...
No one has ever fully explained why, in 2002-3, the virulent pathogen known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) ran rampant in mainland China (5,328 cases, 349 deaths) but only infected four people in South Korea, with no fatalities, and none in Japan. Unlike ...
Two thousand and nine was a good year to be a Haruki Murakami fan. Seven years after writing his last epic novel, “Kafka on the Shore,” with only the bite-sized 2004 “afterdark” to tide over his readership, the author published the massive two-volume “1Q84.” ...
Last week, four Japanese carmakers announced a worldwide recall for vehicles with faulty airbags. According to USA Today, “Toyota, Honda and Nissan need to track down 3 million vehicles around the globe,” and with Mazda later added to the roster, the number rises to ...
Here is Shukan Josei magazine’s nightmare scenario of a typical Japanese salaryman’s TPP future, if in fact Japan joins the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement currently being negotiated among 12 countries. After a genetically-engineered, chemical-drenched breakfast, he hops into his American-made car, drives to his ...
When Ife Adelona saw a picture circulating on Twitter of singer Selena Gomez as an adult-magazine cover girl, the 17-year-old knew what she had to do. “I immediately went for a second source to make sure it wasn’t true,” Ife said. A quick Web ...
Three months before the present crisis on the Korean peninsula, Shukan Jitsuwa (Jan. 24) ran an uncharacteristically astute article predicting that in addition to potential for armed conflict with China over the disputed Senkaku Islands, North Korea, under its inexperienced young leader Kim Jong ...