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CLOUDY
Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s private disco featured not only aspiring showgirls performing striptease acts as sexy nuns and nurses, but one woman dressed up as President Barack Obama and a prominent Milan prosecutor whom the billionaire media mogul has accused of persecuting him, ...
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. The four characters translate loosely as “early root, early sprouting”; ...
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 ...
The government is keeping mum on a secret visit to North Korea by one of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s advisers after Pyongyang revealed it to the United States and South Korea. We “can’t reasonably explain” the visit because it was supposed to be kept ...
100 YEARS AGO Wednesday, May 14, 1913 Illuminations reap a tidy profit for city Tokyo city has withdrawn the illuminations at Hibiya which it made for the benefit of the admirers of the park’s azaleas. The plan proved very successful, greatly benefitting the city ...
“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 ...
Why do people disagree? It seems a stupid question. Maybe it is. Or maybe not. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that we are all rational beings. We possess average intelligence, adequate and more or less similar education, and copious exposure to ...
Germany’s resort island of Sylt has been shaken by the death of a celebrated Japanese chef who was roughed up by two customers who had complained about his food and, according to reports, left without paying. Miki Nozawa died Monday from a brain hemorrhage ...
A South Korean woman who was forced to provide sex for Imperial Japanese soldiers during the war has flown to Hiroshima to criticize Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto for defending Japan’s use of military brothels. “He makes obscene remarks because he doesn’t understand the pain” ...
Incentives are needed to reverse the decline in Japanese enrollment at U.S. universities as Japanese companies compete harder and earlier to recruit new graduates, experts said at a symposium. “They need clear incentives and encouragement from the government, academia, the media and private enterprise. ...
During his surprise visit to Pyongyang, Isao Iijima, a special advisor to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, explained to officials there that Tokyo continues to seek “comprehensive solutions” to the North’s abductions of Japanese and to its nuclear arms and missile threats, a source said ...
Tokyo plans to supply $2 billion over the next five years for Japanese firms to carry out natural resource development projects in African nations, trade minister Toshimitsu Motegi said Saturday. At the first Japan-Africa Ministerial Meeting for Resources Development held in Tokyo on Saturday, ...
Representatives of 18 countries agreed Saturday to enhance cooperation between their public and private sectors to expand useful environmental technologies to achieve both economic growth and greenhouse gas reductions. The agreement came at the East Asia Low Carbon Growth Partnership Dialogue held in Tokyo. ...
Around 120,000 elementary school pupils in the city of Osaka will be given five-day passes for the Osaka municipal subway system to commemorate its 80th year of service Monday. The free passes will be issued via schools in early July and will be valid ...
Michelin awarded three stars to the Nakashima restaurant in Hiroshima in its inaugural guide to the city and neighboring parts of western Japan. Five establishments got two stars: Ajiyoshi, Kodama, Sazanka, Tenko Honten and Tokaan. Another 24 restaurants won a single star. The inspectors ...