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 ...
Is Afghanistan in store for an Iraq-style "soft partition," with protracted strife eventually creating a "hard partition," after U.S. military forces go home.
With U.S. Gen. John Allen's command of NATO forces ending in Kabul, several accomplishments by this man, tainted by an email scandal, merit praise.
The government is trying to persuade local governments concerned in Okinawa and Honshu to accept a U.S. plan to station 24 MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft at U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Ginowan, Okinawa Prefecture, to replace the same number of CH-46 Sea ...
The situation in Syria continues to worsen. While accurate information is difficult to acquire, all indications are that the country hovers on the brink of a civil war. The most recent atrocity is a massacre in the town of Houla that left at least ...
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. ...
I guess I knew it would eventually come down to this: Blame the U.S. Army’s institutions in some way for the horrific and senseless slaughter of 16 innocent Afghan civilians in Kandahar, allegedly by an infantry noncommissioned officer (NCO). In their search for a ...
The last time U.S. President Barack Obama met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it was obvious that the two men distrusted and despised each other. This time (March 5), their mutual dislike was better hidden, but the gulf between them was still as big, ...
Any doubts about Afghanistan’s fragility have been put to rest in recent weeks. Reports that copies of the Quran were inadvertently burned at a coalition military base unleashed a spasm of violence, ranging from mass demonstrations to murder. It has torn apart already strained ...
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 ...
Americans are presidency-addicted. We can’t get enough information about our commanders in chief, yet there is a woeful misunderstanding of the office. The president is more often than not at the mercy of events rather than a master of them. Our greatest presidents were ...
A year after the Arab Spring came to symbolize the ascent of people’s power, hope has given way to a bleak sequel. The democratic awakening has fallen prey to murky geopolitics that has cleaved the Arab Spring into two parts, with the oil monarchies ...
“All right China, come out with your hands up; we’ve got you surrounded!” When one reads about the U.S. “pivot” to Asia, it is almost always cast in terms of countering China’s rise, as if it — and everything else that Washington does in ...
