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P/CLOUDY
NTT DoCoMo Inc., despite being Japan’s biggest mobile phone carrier, has been struggling against tough smartphone competition from KDDI Corp. and Softbank Corp., which is leading in that area. But one edge that the cellphone behemoth — it has more than 60 million subscribers ...
Throughout most of Japan, June is the rainy season. While all that rainfall is great for rice paddies so that we can have delicious new harvest rice in the fall, it makes it a rather dull month for seasonal produce: The summer’s bounty of ...
If you don’t get into the ring once or twice, then you’re a coward, Geoffrey Ima says as he describes people’s attitudes toward boxing in his hometown in Uganda. Ima has been in the ring hundreds of times and came to love boxing so ...
Claude Regy says the team at the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) threw him the “best birthday party ever” when he arrived in Japan just days after the actual May 1 occasion. The 90-year-old French director is hoping for an even better birthday gift, ...
The 27-year-old defender says he was ready for a change of scenery after helping Sanfrecce Hiroshima win theJ. League title last season.
There were high hopes for the Hiroshima Carp heading into the 2013 NPB season but, almost a third of the way into the schedule, the results so far might well be described as a still wait-and-see situation. The Carp are in the middle of ...
He wasn’t the best foreigner to ever play in Japanese baseball, but Brad “The Animal” Lesley was surely one of the most colorful and unforgettable characters to ever put on the uniform of a Central or Pacific League team. The news of his death ...
What do you make of the idea to have the Yomiuri Giants and Hanshin Tigers open the 2014 Japanese baseball season in the U.S.? The tour is reportedly in the works and an official announcement should be coming sometime during May. Preliminary plans call ...
In response to my column of March 17, a couple of readers have come in with suggestions on how to pick up the notoriously slow pace of Japanese baseball games. From the Bay Area, fan Mike Colegate sent the following e-mail. I know that ...
Happy days are here again — or so it would appear — for the hitters in Japanese baseball. The ball is flying once more, as shown by the number of home runs being hit in the early going this season. No one is saying ...
Will the Saitama Seibu Lions be sold? I surely hope not. Despite the problems of its parent company, the franchise has had a colorful 34-year history, and I would like to see it continue. Apparently, former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle feels the same ...
The third World Baseball Classic is now history, and congratulations to the Dominican Republic on the victory. The WBC has gotten better each time, I believe, and it has become an excellent showcase for the game on a worldwide basis, especially since baseball was ...
The March 7 decision by Japanese baseball’s executive committee to drop the 3½-hour time limit on extra-inning games came as welcome news. We have observed the second anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, the subsequent tsunami and nuclear power ...
No doubt the Hanshin Tigers are the more popular of the two Japanese professional baseball teams in the Kansai area. Their games at historic Koshien Stadium between Osaka and Kobe draw packed crowds most of the time, and the fans are arguably the most ...
While Japan and the rest of the baseball universe are deep in the World Baseball Classic fever, the conventional major league and Japanese teams are going about their business getting ready for their respective April 1 and March 29 opening days. In the U.S., ...
Recall our column from last summer pointing out how there are very few catchers in Japanese baseball who can hit? One of the suggestions I made to hopefully improve the situation was for the Japanese teams to see if they can find a halfway ...
It’s time once again to gear up for the World Baseball Classic. The Samurai Japan team was to play its first WBC tuneup game on Sunday against the Hiroshima Carp at Sun Marine Stadium in Miyazaki. This will be followed by another warmup against ...