The 1990s sneaker craze eventually cooled off, but over the past four or five years a new wave has risen, towering over anything that came before.

Scenario: You are congratulating yourself on having snagged a seat on a crowded, early morning Tokyo train, when out of the corner of your eye you spot a woman standing nearby who appears to be pregnant. You know you should offer her your seat, but ...

Six-time world champion yo-yo performer Shu Takada wants to take the yo-yo mainstream and show his tricks to the world

The audience, most of whom are in their 20s and 30s, wave glow sticks and holler as the lights go down for the start of the show. Above the stage, a frame of blue lights throbs and pulses like a circuit board before the ...

Soccer player Shiho Shimoyamada has been encouraged by the response she has received since she became Japan's first openly gay professional athlete in February last year. Now, with this summer's Tokyo Olympics focusing the world's sporting attention on Japan, she is hoping that attitudes towards ...

How much single-use plastic do you think you consume in an average week living in Japan? What if you were to collect all the plastic bottles, shopping bags, food cartons, hand wipe wrappers, straws, cutlery, packaging, packaging-within-packaging and packaging-within-packaging-within-packaging that you accumulate in a week, ...

Sprinter Shunsuke Itani is young, tall, handsome and a contender to win a medal on the track in Tokyo this summer. But he is far from a household name in his native Japan. Having had his right leg amputated below the knee following a motorbike crash ...

Have you ever wondered what it must feel like to be the best in the world at something? To know how sprinter Usain Bolt or figure skater Yuzuru Hanyu feels? To know that, of all the 7.7 billion people in the world, you are the ...

South Africa head coach Rassie Erasmus expressed hope that his team's victory in the Rugby World Cup final against England on Saturday can inspire his nation, but dismissed the notion that the Springboks were under pressure at the tournament. "In South Africa, pressure is not ...

South Africa lifted the Rugby World Cup for the third time after a clinical 32-12 victory over England in Saturday's final. The Springboks grinded England down with their awesome forward power combined with metronomic kicking from standoff Handre Pollard, and headed into the final 20 ...