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P/SUNNY
Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s private disco featured not only aspiring showgirls performing striptease acts as sexy nuns and nurses, but one woman dressed up as President Barack Obama and a prominent Milan prosecutor whom the billionaire media mogul has accused of persecuting him, ...
Tonkatsu is comfort food, gourmand grub — not a gourmet delicacy. So what are those hearty, unpretentious deep-fried breaded pork cutlets doing in an elegant little bar-style restaurant above one of Ginza’s temples to high-end consumption? Katsuzen has come a long way from its ...
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 ...
It is a tricky deal being an authorized biographer. Charles Moore’s big advantage over those who have previously tackled Margaret Thatcher is that he has been provided with material denied to them. Of the arrangement that he was offered by his subject, he writes: ...
Unbelievable energy. Splendid self confidence. Never-wavering faith in his abilities or his teammates. Those are ingredients to success for Draelon Burns, the Yokohama B-Corsairs’ super substitute. Burns buried a remarkable three buzzer-beating shots to close out the three final quarters, and his team needed ...
Would most Americans remain indifferent to the wars their government wages in far-off lands if their media broadcast videos each day of the shattered bodies?
What should a Japanese expat say to a mixed-race couple in New York who wonder how their children would be treated if they raised them in Japan?
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). ...