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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 ...
North Korea replaces its hardline defense chief with a little-known general in a potential bid to solidify leader Kim Jong Un's grip on the military.
U.S. President Barack Obama and South Korea's new leader warn North Korea against further nuclear provocations, with Obama declaring that the days when Pyongyang could "create a crisis and elicit concessions" were over.
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 ...
Conflicting accounts from U.S. intelligence about the status of North Korea’s nuclear weapons development underscore just how difficult it is for American spy agencies to penetrate its inscrutable regime, officials and experts said. The world’s most powerful intelligence apparatus is often left to guesswork ...
Much like his father, Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s new young leader is viewed by much of the outside world with a heady mix of incomprehension, ridicule and fear. In early March, people were shaking their heads in bemusement at photos of Kim Jong ...
Soaring tensions on the Korean Peninsula have seen dire North Korean threats met with an unusually assertive U.S. response that analysts warn could take a familiar game into dangerous territory. By publicly highlighting its recent deployment of nuclear-capable B-52 and stealth bombers over South ...
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un orders missile units to prepare to strike the U.S. mainland and military bases, vowing to "settle accounts" after American stealth bombers flew over South Korea.
North Korea’s top leaders are to meet in the coming days to decide on an unspecified “important” issue, official media said Wednesday, as tensions simmer on the Korean Peninsula. The Political Bureau of the Communist Party’s Central Committee will convene its plenary meeting before ...
North Korea leader Kim Jong Un threatened to “wipe out” a South Korean island as Pyongyang came under new economic and diplomatic fire Tuesday from U.S. sanctions and U.N. charges of gross rights abuses. Military tensions on the Korean Peninsula have risen to their ...
The Korean Peninsula is about to become a practice battlefield, with both the North and South staging major military drills as tensions keep their armies on a hair trigger.
With tensions surging on the Korean Peninsula, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un talked of “all-out war” as he toured a frontline unit that shelled the South in 2010, state media said Friday. Visiting two islands close to the disputed maritime border with South ...
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un oversaw a live-fire artillery drill aimed at simulating an “actual war,” state media reported a day after South Korea swore in its first female president. “An endless barrage of shells were fired by artillery pieces on ‘enemy positions,’ ...