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 ...

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, ...

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 ...