Transport authorities launched a full-fledged investigation Sunday into the derailment of a bullet train on the Akita Shinkansen Line in Daisen, Akita Prefecture, on Saturday afternoon.
It's a dangerous, unpredictable world. Twice in January Chinese warships in the East China Sea challenged Japan's Maritime Self Defense Forces patrols in a manner deemed threatening. And on Feb. 12 came North Korea's nuclear test.
Here's an open secret: Japanese men have a bad international reputation on the romance front.
SELLING WOMEN: Prostitution, Markets and the Household in Early Modern Japan, by Amy Stanley. University of California Press, 2012, 282 pp., $49.95 (hardcover) In the vast cultural landscape, Japan fascinates the mainstream with manga and anime, the martial arts, Zen and kimono. Of course, ...
Kenta Maeda shook off worries about his form with five shutout innings as Japan beat China 5-2 in first-round Pool A of the World Baseball Classic on Sunday at Fukuoka Dome. Japan improved to 2-0 following a tough win over Brazil in Saturday evening’s ...
Unnecessary U.S. wars in the Middle East have unintended consequences at home just as Japan's war against China still casts its shadows to this day.
Is The New York Times inciting a U.S. war against Iran? As it did the war against Iraq? A decade ago, the paper’s Judith Miller, along with a few of her fellow reporters, so unabashedly agitated for President George W. Bush attacking Iraq that ...
Suppose a Seung-Hui Cho, Jared Lee Loughner, James Eagan Holmes or an Adam Lanza shot and killed or seriously wounded any of the families of John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Would any of them have given different opinions ...
So, Shintaro Ishihara, who had abruptly quit the Tokyo governorship in October, set up a political party named Taiyo no To, then merged it with Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto’s political party that doesn’t sound like one, Nippon Ishin no Kai. Another political party that ...
Things do sometimes go backward. This truism hit me recently while I was checking the galleys of “Persona,” my biography, with Naoki Inose, of Yukio Mishima. I was deep in the proofreading when the publisher’s agent asked if I knew of two earlier books ...
Gore Vidal, who died at the end of July, was one writer whose essays I began to read years ago. I then moved on to his novels, though I saw one of his more famous Broadway plays, “The Best Man,” only recently for the ...
On Independence Day (July 4), The New York Times printed the Declaration of Independence, as it had done — the daily noted in an article on the preceding day — for 90 years, since 1922. What the announcement the day before did was tell ...
In going over my manuscript of the Yukio Mishima biography, my copy editor protested at one point, citing her “liberal Berkeley-influenced sensibilities.” That was where I described Japan as a “backward nation.” Let me explain. In 1958, Mishima dictated an entire book in the ...
One recent topic for The Wall Street Journal’s front-page space set aside for stories other than the daily shenanigans of business, politics and wars was the community in Florida created for retired letter carriers. (“In Florida, These Retirees Deliver a First-Class Protest,” March 27.) ...
Until The New York Times pointed it out earlier this month, I had failed to notice, alas, that Tokyo had given cherry trees to this city as it did to Washington, D.C., 100 years ago (“Gifts From Japan, Less Celebrated in Manhattan,” April 12). ...
In the early hours of March 11, Sunday, a U.S. soldier went on a rampage in a village in Panjway, southwest of Kandahar, Afghanistan. He went from one mud house to another, shot, stabbed, and burned 16 villagers. Or so it has been reported. ...
Sometimes people make a startlingly mindless argument. One recent example is “Drones for Human Rights” (New York Times, Jan. 31). “Drones are not just for firing missiles in Pakistan,” began Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Mark Hanis, who co-wrote the op-ed. “In Iraq, the State ...
