JAPAN LITE

When I first came to Japan, I was stunned by the beauty of the Seto Inland Sea. Its thousands of peaked islands look as if they'd dropped straight from the sky and settled like gum drops on the water. Stretching 450 kilometers from Osaka ...

In 1185, Japan's Taira (Heike) and Minamoto (Genpei) clans played out the final battle of the Genpei War, the result of which would have a profound effect on Japan ushering in its first shogun with Kamakura as the shogunate. In the latter part of the ...

As I made my way up the steep road to Kakurin Temple — aka Temple No. 20, I realized how foolish I had been to have bought a bicycle. Rising at dawn, I had ticked off temples 18 and 19 of the 88-temple Shikoku ...

Living on an island that was too small to receive direct attacks didn't stop the people living there from having to take extreme measures.

Mitsuko Amano was born in year 19 of the Showa Era (1944). World War II was still a year away from ending, and at the time nearly 2,000 people made their living on Shiraishi (White Stone) Island, the place she called home in the ...

It's April on Shiraishi Island in Japan's Seto Inland Sea. The nights are still crisp, dipping to 4 degrees Celsius, but the sky is clear and the stars arc over the beach like thousands of glittery sequins on a pop idol's stage dress. The ...

I was speaking with a woman the other day who had recently been to Japan. She acknowledged that Japan is the "in" place to travel to and, as if to qualify this fact, complained that "Kyoto was so crowded, I couldn't even get a ...

It's not easy being an expat. While most of us choose to live in Japan of our own volition, there are still times when we're frustrated with the way things work — or don't work — and the Community page often serves as an ...

On a recent bus trip in Indonesia, I struck up a conversation with the man sitting next to me who told me he was Malaysian but living in Australia, which prompted me to admit that I was American but living in Japan. This seemed ...