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A sit-in by visa violators and their families entered its second day Tuesday in front of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau with protesters seeking government good will. The action at the bureau in Minato Ward is being organized by the Asian People’s Friendship Society, ...
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, ...
Takashi Miike's blood-soaked vengeance tale, one of two Japanese films being shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, draws the biggest boos so far, with critics savaging it as overacted and cliched.
Have you ever given your best effort while striving to achieve something but felt like what you were doing was futile? That’s the feeling I’m getting about Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Olympics. With just over three months to go until the IOC ...
The wise have always inveighed against materialism. But most people are not wise, and it remains a material world. The economy dominates the news, an indication of where our strongest interest lies. Our spirits rise or fall with the stock market, the unemployment rate, ...
If you live in the Tokyo metropolitan area, you have access to the greatest network in the universe, but if you don't you may find your local transportation options dwindling.
Under an overcast sky, an old farmer plants seeds in a field that had been ravaged by a tsunami. An angel watches his efforts and begs the sun to show itself, which it does, giving the farmer some hope. This is the story of ...
Unlike many of her prim-and-proper friends at Shirayuri College — a Catholic school in Kanda, Tokyo — 20-year-old Akane Kanbayashi doesn't recoil at the sight of splattered blood and dismembered human bodies.
TV personalities, or tarento in the vernacular parlance, wage a never-ending battle against encroaching irrelevance. They impose on our consciousness, and one of the easiest ways to do that without offering a compelling skills set is to exploit personal circumstances that are none of ...
The angels that guard you / When you drive / Usually retire / At sixty-five That ditty, for Burma-Shave brushless shaving cream, appeared in signs along U.S. highways in the early 1960s. The number 65 suggested drivers who exceeded that figure in miles per ...
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first TV broadcast of anime in Japan, which kicked off with “Astro Boy” created by the “god of manga” Osamu Tezuka. With anime gaining popularity around the world over the past half century, it has become ...
Is it true, as the American philosopher George Santayana famously remarked just over a century ago, that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”? If it is, is the reverse necessarily false? Imagine he had said — his eye, for ...
A video of high school boys laughing about watching the rape of a “dead drunk” teenage girl who “deserved to be peed on” drew a horde of reporters to a small Ohio town for a trial Wednesday. While the video and a photo of ...
As the second anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake approached, the media again rallied to pay tribute to the tragedy's victims, whether dead or alive. Many of the latter are still in limbo, unsure of their future since the events of that day ...
Last July, a lay judge panel in Osaka handed down a 20-year prison sentence to a man convicted of killing his sister after the prosecution had only asked for 16 years. Earlier this month the Osaka High Court reduced that sentence to 14 years, ...
Pollutants from China and their resultant problems are nothing new to Japan. Acid rain, principally caused by high levels of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide in industrial pollutants, has been a concern for several decades. While Kyushu and western Japan are most vulnerable to ...