100 YEARS AGO Thursday, Sept. 11, 1913 Free rent to those with no fear of cats Anyone who is not afraid of cats or knows how to drive away a great plague of feline roughs and toughs is offered the use of a house ...

Historian Naotsugu Hamada has proposed a new theory about the 1613 mission that Date Masamune, Sendai’s then-feudal lord, sent to Europe and Mexico, arguing that he may have intended to use funds from trade with Mexico to reconstruct Tohoku, which had been rocked by ...

A newly authorized South Korean history textbook includes some positive passages about Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula before and during World War II, according to local reports. The textbook describes how new cities that developed under colonial rule became transport and distribution ...

An Ibaraki Prefecture-based group aims to make a movie on a former Imperial Japanese Navy air unit based in the present city of Kasama that trained kamikaze pilots near the end of the war. The Tsukuba air unit, launched in 1934, used the mainstay ...

The stir caused by a textbook's descriptions of the mass lynching of Koreans following the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake prompts Yokohama's board of education to order schools to collect the books from students.

Few countries have broken with their past as sharply as Japan did. That was the price it paid for modernity. Japan in the mid-19th century had a beautiful, deep, highly refined culture that reached far down the social scale — but it was an ...

100 YEARS AGO Wednesday, Aug. 6, 1913 Swimmers cool off in Tokyo’s Sumida River “O Joy! Come in and splash me!” The exhilarating shouts of boys and girls are heard all along the Sumida River, which has been turned into a continuous swimming pool ...

In 1956 and 1957, the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong wanted a Japanese Class-A war criminal who remained an influential figure in the postwar era to visit China in an apparent effort to normalize diplomatic ties with Japan, according to recently disclosed diplomatic documents. ...

Japan has yet to dispose of arsenic residue from chemical weapons its Imperial army abandoned in China at the end of World War II, a source close to bilateral relations said Wednesday, noting there are calls for the toxin to be sent to Japan. ...