Postcards written by Soseki Natsume in the U.K. found after 100 years
Three postcards written by the Japanese literary legend Soseki Natsume (1867-1916) over 100 years ago during his studies in Britain have been found, the prefectural government of Fukui said Wednesday. The postcards were sent to his Japanese friends studying in Germany. In one of the postcards, written a month after Natsume ...
Closure: California kin rejoice as lost WWII airman's plane is found off Papua New Guinea
When Tom Kelly's relatives got word — almost 74 years to the date — that his B-24 bomber had been ...
Watanabe Kazan: Too open-minded for Edo
Imagine living in a "closed country." Japan was such for over two centuries, from the anti-Christian hysteria of the 1630s ...
New memorial to victims of Japanese merchant ship sunk in WWI to be unveiled in Wales
A new memorial commemorating those who died in the German sinking of a Japanese merchant ship in the final days of World War I will be unveiled later this year in Wales. More than 200 sailors and passengers died when the Hirano Maru was torpedoed ...
Hiroshima hibakusha recalls warmth of Southeast Asian students who helped her survive A-bomb blast
Meiko Kurihara was a 19-year-old mobilized student at Toyo Kogyo (now Mazda Motor Corp.) when the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Now 92 and living in a nursing home in Hiroshima, Kurihara remembers being badly hurt by flying glass from the blast. ...
Japan 1943: 'Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto dies a gallant death in action'
100 YEARS AGO Thursday, May 2, 1918 Brave little girl saves father from burglar A brave little girl faced an armed robber who broke into the house of Naojiro Naito, a grocer of Nippori, a suburb of Tokyo, at midnight on the 29th of last month. The noise ...
Memories preserved of Japanese born in Taiwan during colonial rule
Japanese who lived in Taiwan during a 50-year period of colonial rule ultimately weren't given a choice after the end of World War II: They were forced to repatriate to a country many hadn't stepped foot in for decades, if ever. Altogether, over 300,000 returned ...
150 years since the Edo Castle surrender
What's done is done. But what if a historic negotiation over the surrender of Edo Castle between Saigo Takamori, who led the Imperial forces during the fall of Edo, and Katsu Kaishu, the shogunate's army minister, had fallen through 150 years ago? The surrender ...
Names of 3,607 members of Imperial Japanese Army's notorious Unit 731 released by national archives
The secretive unit’s commander, Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii, and others received immunity from prosecution by giving the United States its data on germ warfare.
Ando Shoeki: He who dared anger the gods
A mind like Shoeki Ando — bold, mischievous, unconventional, borderline crackpot, one might almost say — is worth probing, if only for those qualities, let alone for his ideas, which leave the mainstream so far behind that the word "evil" has been attached to ...
Hiroshima hibakusha turns to tanka for anti-nuclear message
For Sachiko Tanaka, her battered Japanese dictionary, the Kojirin, is not just any other lexicon. It was something Tanaka read in her bed under the covers during blackouts throughout World War II, something she had in her hands when the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima on ...
Japan Times 1918: Japan now has female street car conductors
100 YEARS AGO Sunday, April 21, 1918 A private street-car company, the Mino Denki Kido Kaisha, in the Nagoya district, following the example in other belligerent countries has made the interesting experiment of employing women conductors. Three girls, all under 20 years of age, have been on ...
Tsushima Island was key conduit of Japan's Edo Period trade with Korea
Japan's historic relationship with the Korean Peninsula has often been complicated by mutual misunderstanding and distrust, if not outright hostility. But on Tsushima, a Japanese island off the coast of the peninsula, efforts are being made to celebrate long-ago diplomatic missions with Korea that ...
Taiwan digitizes Japanese colonial-era blueprints of railway stations
Taiwan is working to digitize the blueprints of railway stations built by Japan during its 50-year colonial rule of the island, the Taiwanese Ministry of Culture announced Wednesday. Yang Tzu-pao, deputy minister of culture, told a news conference that the digital images of the design ...
Till death do us unite: Japan's dark tales of love
Has ever a civilized people lived in greater intimacy with death than the Japanese?
