"How wonderful! How marvelous! From here to the southeast is what the Westerners call the Pacific Ocean and the American states! They must be very close!" — Watanabe Kazan, artist and samurai, in a diary recording a sojourn in Enoshima, an island off Kamakura in present-day Kanagawa Prefecture, in 1821.

Close indeed. Closer than he or any Japanese then knew. Just around the corner, in fact.

"Intercourse shall be continued forever." — Shogun Tokugawa Iesada (under duress), to U.S. Consul Townsend Harris, 1857.

Our Planet

Tugboats assist a liquified natural gas tanker as it docks at a port in Yantai, China, in February. In 2021, China became the largest importer of LNG, and as of this year, China now has the most long-term LNG contracts.
China is eroding Japan's LNG dominance. How does that affect Japanese buyers?

Longform

After the asset-price bubble crash of the early 1990s, employment at a Japanese company was no longer necessarily for life. As a result, a new generation is less willing to endure a toxic work culture —life’s too short, after all.
How Japan's youth are slowly changing the country's work ethic