For James Pearson's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
A young couple with matching expressions stare nervously into the camera with deep brown eyes. He, a Vietnamese student, has just met the love of his life. She, a North Korean, is forbidden to love him back. It was 31 years after Pham Ngoc Canh, ...
Nestled in a leafy park between a rusting Soviet fighter jet and the old East German Embassy, a lonely statue of Lenin stands in the center of Hanoi as a symbol of the Russian revolutionary's inspiration to communist-ruled Vietnam. Yet in 1986, one year after ...
Some oil blocks off Vietnam's sprawling coastline fall within an area of the South China Sea demarcated by China's "nine-dash line," the basis for Beijing's controversial claims to most of the resource-rich waterway. Last week, sources said Rosneft Vietnam BV, a unit of Russian state ...
It wasn't until Pham Chi Cuong saw the plane waiting to deport him from the United States that it sunk in that he was about to be sent back to Vietnam, the country he fled in 1993. Cuong and at least three other deportees who ...
Even the bright-red lighthouse in the tiny South Korean port of Sinnam is shaped like a penis. The port is home to Haesindang Park, better known as "Penis Park," a monument to fertility based on the "Legend of Auebawi and Haesindang," about a virgin and ...
On an icy December day in 2011, North Korea's new leader Kim Jong Un was accompanied by seven advisers as they escorted the hearse that carried his father, Kim Jong Il, through the streets of Pyongyang. None of the men remain with the young Kim. ...
Take the dregs left from making soy bean oil, which usually go to feed the pigs. Press and roll them into a sandy-colored paste. Stuff with rice, and top with chili sauce. The dish's name, "injogogi," means "man-made meat." In North Korea for years it ...
In 2009, a pop video from North Korea celebrated a new national hero — one that outside experts would later realize was at the heart of the secretive state's banned nuclear and missile programs. That hero, widely available in factories across the world, was the ...
In the seaside city of Wonsan, North Korean families cook up barbecues on the beach, go fishing, and eat royal jelly flavored ice cream in the summer breeze. For their leader Kim Jong Un, the resort is a summer retreat, a future temple to ...
Late summer rains and the growing importance of privately produced crops mean North Korea will likely avoid acute food shortages this year despite earlier fears of drought and mounting international sanctions, defectors and experts say. The U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned in July ...
