For Sumiko Oshima's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Think Edo Period, and you think ukiyo-e, bonsai, yakimono and kabuki. Few think of science, or of the technological skill and spirit, which would later hatch Sony, Toyota and a core part of the country's national identity. For a long time, little attention was ...
Until six years ago, Nobutaka Murao says, he was just another central government bureaucrat. Then he was posted to the Mie Prefectural Government in July 1995, on loan from the Finance Ministry, and everything changed. When he found out about his posting as chief of ...
Dressed in a white robe, a female qi master calmly stands in a room. Her face a mask of concentration, she puts her hands into a metal box. She quietly waits for three minutes. Then concentrates for seven minutes. Her hands rest on a ...
Get away. Away from squeezing yourself into a packed train, making your way in a slow-moving human tide up stairs and through ticket gates. From walking in a crowd like a soldier ant, trotting ahead to avoid cigarette smoke from a man in front, ...
However disgusting it may seem, eating bugs is deeply rooted in many cultural traditions. In Southeast Asian and African countries, live insects are sold at markets along with vegetables and meat. At movie theaters in Asia and Africa, people munch roasted insects like they ...
A short walk along a twisting, narrow stone path branching off a busy road through Tokyo's Yanaka district brings you to the warm glow of a small andon lamp, its paper shade mounted on a wooden frame. There, in a square hardly bigger than a ...
Katsuya Takasu regards his body as a vehicle to carry his mind. So what he had done to his face two years ago was, as he puts it, "just like fixing an old jalopy." A cosmetic surgeon himself, Takasu gave instructions from the operating table ...
You might think that athlete's foot is a man's problem and the bunion, or hallux valgus, is a woman's problem. You'd be wrong. There are many female patients who knowingly or unknowingly carry the fungal infection on their feet, while some male bunion patients ...
A wedding ceremony may be the culmination of romantic love, but it's also when life within the institution of marriage begins. The official constraints that institution imposes were rammed home to me -- yet again -- last month when I went to collect my new ...
The children were considered lucky when they were admitted a place at the popular Sashigaya public nursery in Tokyo's Bunkyo Ward. Little did their parents know what a high price their young ones might have to pay for the privilege. Two summers ago, in early ...
