For Yumiko Iida's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Alarmed by the nation's dwindling birthrate, a government task force recently came up with a plan to distribute so-called women's handbooks as a means of encouraging young women to have children. The plan, however, faced harsh criticism for treating pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing as matters ...
Prime Minister Abe's proposal to expand child care leave to three years is upsetting some firms because it runs against current programs designed to support working parents.
Just two months after the tsunami on March 11, 2011, devastated the city of Kesennuma in Miyagi Prefecture, Emi Satomi and a group of nursery teachers whose jobs were eliminated by the catastrophe began a makeshift day care center in a warehouse up on ...
When the ground shook and buildings trembled that cold afternoon in March 2011, the first words to come into Gina Konishi's head were "Diyos ko po," a Tagalog prayer that means "God please help me." The 32-year-old Filipino resident of Ofunato, Iwate Prefecture, was with ...
Stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka and celebrated novelist Haruki Murakami may have very different professional talents, but they share one hobby in common: running. For both, the former a joint winner of this year's Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine and the latter a major ...
