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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 ...
They're funny, finicky and feisty, not to mention being full of wicked mischief, with their own way of talking, too. Outside of Japan, think of Liverpool, not London; or Munich, not Berlin; or Mumbai, not Delhi. I'm talking about the people of Osaka.
Calling all those readers who in their heart of hearts have always wanted to be British! Well, you’ve got your chance now, you presumptuous Penny-Laners and putative Pythons. That chance comes courtesy of a test known as “The Stonehenge Plunge,” which last year 150,000 ...
“They were remarks made to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. But since then we have welcomed in the 21st century."
Second of two parts Next month we will commemorate the second anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, and the ongoing nuclear calamity that ensued. But the personal tragedies it has brought about will remain on the conscience of the Japanese until ...
Covering the catastrophic series of events that began with the magnitude 9 earthquake and the tsunami it triggered on March 11, 2011, "Tōden Fukushima Genpatsu Jiko Sōri Toshite Kangaeta Koto" is one of the most revealing and insightful books published in Japan in ...
What is behind the miserable social status of women in Japan? In October last year, the World Economic Forum, a prestigious independent organization based in Geneva, published a report on the gender gap in countries around the world. Japan’s overall ranking was 101, the ...
Beate Sirota Gordon passed away on Dec. 30. She was 89. In 1946, when Article 24 of the Japanese Constitution was being written — and finding herself to be “the only woman in the room,” as she put it with inveterate modesty in her ...
Way back in the heady 1960s, Japan was one big Cathedral of Optimism, and I found myself among a people who believed their country was finally on that road laid out before them in the post-feudal Meiji Era (1868-1912) to “catch up with and ...
Ryotaro Shiba, the great author of historical novels, was a student of Mongolian at Osaka University of Foreign Languages when, at the end of 1943, he was drafted into the army. Then aged 20, he received a “provisional graduation qualification” (the actual certificate was ...
If you remember the Pinto, dear reader, then you may be as old as the hills — or at least as old as I am. No, I am not referring to the horse that the Cisco Kid rode, a feisty pinto named Diablo. I’m ...
This is the 15th general election I have witnessed since coming to live in Japan in 1967, and by any standards it is the most crucial one of those for this country. Only once before have I regarded an upcoming general election in the ...
There are approximately 7,000 exhibits in Kiev’s Ukrainian National Chornobyl Museum. (The location of the nuclear plant that exploded on April 26, 1986 is spelled this way in Ukrainian.) Among the documents, photographs, maps and objects at this museum that opened on the sixth ...