For Minami Funakoshi's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Shinobu Sakamoto was just 15 when she left home in the Kumamoto Prefecture fishing village of Minamata to go to Stockholm and tell the world of the horrors of mercury poisoning. Forty-five years on, she has flown overseas again, this time to Geneva, to attend ...
Penniless and subsisting on only water for three weeks, Tokyo street-dweller Tokuchika Nishi thought he had come to the end of his life. "My money ran out and I thought it would be fine to just die a dog's death," says Nishi, 38, who had ...
Meet Lulu Hashimoto, Japan's first "living doll" fashion model. Lulu — a full-body doll suit consisting of a wig, a mask and stockings patterned with doll-like joints — was born from one woman's desire to become cute. "I have always really liked dolls and for me, ...
A Vietnamese man held in a solitary cell at an immigration detention center in Japan committed suicide, a Vietnamese community leader said, raising fresh questions over conditions in the country's detention facilities. Nguyen The Hung killed himself on Saturday at the East Japan Immigration Center ...
"Radiation! Bang bang!" Gesturing as if with guns, two boys in Tokyo repeatedly taunted a girl whose family fled to the capital to escape radioactivity unleashed by the Fukushima nuclear crisis in 2011. Tormented by headaches and weight loss, the girl began to skip classes, and ...
On a morning in mid-September, Utinan Won hugged his mother and then watched as she passed through departures at Tokyo's Narita airport on her way to Bangkok. Two and a half months earlier, judges in a Tokyo court upheld deportation orders against 16-year-old Utinan and ...
Visa please fall on deaf ears as justice ministry insists on executing deportation orders.
A prominent Nigerian asylum seeker and activist is being held in solitary confinement at a Tokyo detention center, a case that has highlighted a growing crackdown on foreign nationals living in Japan without visas, prompting demands for her release. Elizabeth Aruoriwo Obueza was detained last ...
Mazlum Balibay paves Japan's roads, digs its sewers and lays its water pipes — all for a country that doesn't want him. Balibay, 24, is a Kurdish asylum seeker who fled to Japan more than eight years ago after he said his family was persecuted ...
When Saori Ito went on maternity leave last year and stopped getting a regular paycheck from her cosmetics company, she became worried about her future — and wondered if this kind of anxiety is what awaits her after retirement. The 34-year-old married mother of a ...
