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Tokyo Skytree will celebrate its first anniversary Wednesday but has not yet completed its prime mission of reliably broadcasting to households in the capital and its suburbs. Since December, the world’s tallest free-standing tower, at 634 meters high, has been making test broadcasts to ...
If you work in an office, you probably spend a fair part of your time sitting at a desk, which, of course, isn’t very healthy. To combat that the Pomodoro technique recommends that you work in intervals with regular breaks — for example, 25 ...
“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, ...
“Outsider art” is relatively new in Japan and, as a genre, works made by self-taught Japanese artists are still not very well known on the category-delineating, label-loving international art scene. Now, though, “Souzou: Outsider Art from Japan,” an exhibition on view (through June 30) ...
After all these years, Rafael Nadal still knows how to dominate Roger Federer. In the 30th meeting between the two tennis greats, Nadal controlled the final from start to finish to win 6-1, 6-3 Sunday for his seventh Italian Open title. “Rafa was just ...
Last month, two members of the U.S. Senate vilified Eduardo Saverin, the cofounder of Facebook Inc., for doing something that Americans are apparently coming to consider a punishable sin. Sen. Charles Schumer, along with three cosponsors, has introduced a bill in the Senate to ...
You gotta hand it to the Americans. By god, they invented or at least morphed into profitability just about everything that’s on my desk as I write this: my landline telephone; my iPad, which is open to my Facebook page; a DVD of the ...
Areport this year by the Independent Investigation Committee on the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, a group set up in September 2011 by the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, condemned what it called Japan’s “absolute safety myth.” The Japanese government, in collusion with the media and the ...
Open any Japanese newspaper, listen to the radio, watch television or keep tabs on any other form of media, social or otherwise, and you are bound to find references to this country’s “rapidly aging society.” We are constantly reminded of the fact that the ...
In the French writer-director Jacques Tati’s superb 1967 film “Play Time,” people are like prisoners condemned to roam about in and amid the glass cages of high-rise office blocks. They are lost, both to the world and themselves. In the world of Tati, who ...
Sara Blakely’s story is inspirational. The 41-year-old Floridian began her working life as a door-to-door fax-machine salesperson. Then one day she looked in the mirror — but not at her face. She realized that she needed underwear that didn’t show lines and held in ...
“If young people’s aversion to sex continues to increase at the present rate, the situation of Japan’s low fertility rate and rapid ageing will rapidly worsen. … The Japanese economy will lose its vitality even more than now. If this happens, this nation might ...
“I don’t think there is another nation of people in the world like the Japanese. In Britain there is coal in Wales, but Japan makes up for the lack of such a place with an abundance of national will and national sensitivity … a ...
Putin’s in a pickle and Russia’s in the soup. At least that’s what many who write about the “Dear Leader” and his country seem to be saying. But is it so? Certainly there is disruption, the kind of disruption that sits just below the ...
In September 1943, eight British officers were tortured by their Japanese captors at the prisoner-of-war camp in Kanchanaburi, Thailand. The camp, and a nearby bridge over the Kwai River, were later the setting for director David Lean’s multi-Oscar-winning 1957 film “The Bridge on the ...
On March 11, I went to Morioka, Iwate Prefecture, to deliver an address at a ceremony marking the first anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the awful tsunami it caused, which inflicted terrible destruction and loss of life along some 400 km ...
One of my most treasured possessions is an old photograph. Taken in 1910, in Krakow, Poland, it shows five generations of my ancestors on my mother’s side, beginning with my great-great-grandfather, Joseph Pinkus Krengel, who was born in 1818. Due to the unusual nature ...