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November 09, 2025
 

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Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / 20 QUESTIONS
Mar 21, 2020

Ken Mogi: Brain science and other thoughts

Ken Mogi talks about the significance of studying the brain and how he likes to use his.
Japan Times
BUSINESS / Companies
Feb 18, 2020

Masayoshi Son's big real estate venture with Oyo runs into real problems in Japan

Last March, months before the meltdown at WeWork, Masayoshi Son worked through the prospects for another one of his favorite portfolio companies — a startup from India called Oyo.
JAPAN / History
Feb 26, 2019

Writers recall their initiation to Japanese literature via Donald Keene

The Japan Times asked author Suzanne Kamata to reach out to some of her fellow writers for their memories and thoughts about Donald Keene, the noted scholar of Japanese literature who died Sunday in Tokyo at age 96. Here is a short collection of their replies.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jan 26, 2019

End of an era gives Japan a chance to hit the reset button

Maybe we're immortal. It's not a new idea. Christianity's appeal over 2,000 years rests largely on its promise of eternal life. In Japanese Buddhism, the soul passes from life to life — a dreadful prospect, it was held, which only the enlightened escaped.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Sep 21, 2018

University of Tokyo student goes the extra trillions of miles to study exoplanets

A Ph.D. student at the University of Tokyo, has recently helped discover 44 planets outside of our solar system. Such planets — known as exoplanets — were until recently only theoretical, and they inspire great excitement among astronomers.
Japan Times
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Oct 14, 2017

Japan's 'way of the sword' baffles foreign observers

All cultures present aspects that cannot but baffle the foreign observer. For example: nothing in the native tradition equips a Japanese to grasp the concept of the blood of the crucified son of the one God washing believers clean of sin.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 25, 2017

Counting what really counts in development

Statistics, while useful, do not tell the entire story of development.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / FOREIGN AGENDA
Aug 27, 2017

How a love of Japan led me to stop dating its women

A British academic concludes that the only way he can truly enjoy and develop his love for Japan is by excluding his love life from the equation.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 25, 2017

Enjoy Earth Day, while you last

Earth's climate will probably recover from this human-fueled round of global warming, but on time scales that are unimaginable to humans. And perhaps without humans.
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Jan 14, 2017

The evolution of the Japanese ego: Learning to say 'I'

When Adam and Eve defied God, creator and master of the universe, and ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, what did they learn? To say "I."
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 17, 2016

Should children be granted the right to die?

Minors with a demonstrable capacity for rational decision-making should have the right to request euthanasia.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jul 2, 2016

Black Illumination: Zen and the poetry of death

On a winter morning in 1360, Zen master Kozan Ichikyo gathered together his pupils. Kozan, 77, told them that, upon his death, they should bury his body, perform no ceremony and hold no services in his memory. Sitting in the traditional Zen posture, he then wrote the following:
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Oct 10, 2015

Home sweet home: Preserving the traditional Kanazawa townhouse

Traditional wooden townhouses called machiya could once be found throughout Japan and were especially common in cities such as Kyoto and Nara in Kansai, as well as Kanazawa in Ishikawa Prefecture.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Society / FOCUS
Apr 16, 2015

Some prisons in Japan becoming 'like nursing homes' amid surge in elderly offenders

Most prisons spend a lot of time and effort keeping inmates from escaping, but a greater challenge is convincing some convicts to leave.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / COMMUNITY CHEST
Apr 8, 2015

Do Western men have it bad in Japan? Readers discuss

A small selection of the large number of comments received in response to Olga Garnova's recent column, 'Spare a thought for Western men trapped in Japan.'
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Jan 10, 2015

Code + culture: New Internet artists from Japan

If the Internet is an ocean, why do we spend so much time floating on its surface? What's really going on down there? Not just in the deepest, darkest trenches, but among the forgotten protocols, faulty algorithms and emerging parameters outside the busy shipping lanes and far from the crowded life rafts...
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 23, 2014

Choosing death when loss of self is imminent

For people who do not want to live on when their mind has gone, deciding whether and when to die is difficult, and likely to meet resistance from loved ones.
JAPAN / JAPAN TIMES FORUM ON FEMALE SCIENCE MAJORS
Jun 30, 2014

Majoring in science may expand opportunities for women

Moderator: Let's discuss the challenge of hiring more female science majors and solutions to that issue. Let me first ask you what kind of skills are you seeking in women? I wonder if the marketing skills of female science majors, instead of just their capabilities in research and development, could...
COMMENTARY / Japan
Mar 4, 2014

Our beastly post-Fukushima age

We have to remember the Fukushima nuclear disaster from the perspective of how Japan's system for providing meat, vegetables, rice, fish and other foods is still suffering as a result.
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health
Sep 15, 2013

2013: A space conundrum

Long ago, in a dreamier era, space stations were imagined as portals to the heavens. In the 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," the huge structure twirled in orbit, aesthetically sublime, a relaxing way station for astronauts heading to the moon. It featured a Hilton and a Howard Johnson's.
EDITORIALS
Jan 6, 2013

Happiest people in the world

Japan may have a relatively high standard of living and the longest life expectancy in the world, but it does not have the happiest people. According to a new Gallup poll of 148 countries, Japan ranks somewhere in the middle of world happiness levels. The recent poll showed just how little economic levels...
People demonstrate outside the Ministry of Health to demand the right to a safe and free abortion as Non Una di Meno (Not One Less) movement and feminist collectives take part in a protest to mark the International Safe Abortion Day, in Rome on Sept. 28, 2024.
WORLD / Society
Jul 15, 2025

Italy's abortion taboos challenged by new law in Sicily

More than 80% of gynecologists in Sicily refuse to perform abortions for moral or religious reasons, though the procedure has been a legal right for women in Italy since 1978.
Pham Thi Bich Hau (fifth from left) began translating and interpreting for the Vietnamese community in Japan in 2013, when she was working for a trainee management organization. She went on to found the Vietnam Women's Union in Japan, organizing activities like the Tet festival pictured here.
COMMUNITY / Issues / The Foreign Element
Jul 21, 2025

The mothers holding up Japan's Vietnamese community

Online support groups and in-person events are helping Vietnamese women from all walks of life manage motherhood abroad.
A coral reef in Okinawa in July 2022. Some jurisdictions around the world have moved to ban certain sunscreens in a bid to protect coral reefs, but some say the impact on reefs is far from clear.
ENVIRONMENT / Wildlife / OUR PLANET
Jul 20, 2025

Japan’s top brands get tied up in the great sunscreen debate

The debate over the damage sunscreens cause to the marine environment is heating up as some regions ban certain chemical ingredients.
Wakana, a Japanese fan of Thai BL, visits a temple in Thon Buri, Bangkok featured in the Thai adaptation of the Japanese series “Cherry Magic.” Her media consumption kindled an interest in Thai culture and language, and ultimately led her to relocate to Thailand. “I fell in love with the whole country,” she says.
COMMUNITY / Issues / The Foreign Element
Jul 28, 2025

Boys’ love dramas from Thailand make waves in Japan

Thailand has become a top producer of BL (boys’ love) dramas — and audiences in Japan are among the most ardent consumers.
Koichi Tagawa’s diary entry from Aug. 9, 1945, describes the day of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
JAPAN / History / Longform
Aug 8, 2025

The horrors of Nagasaki, in first person

At 17, Koichi Tagawa survived Nagasaki’s atomic blast and recording two months of grief, destruction and the loss of his mother in a diary he kept for life.
Police round up war orphans in an underpass in Ueno, Tokyo, in a file photo taken in February 1948.
JAPAN / History
Aug 28, 2025

Never again, says woman orphaned by Tokyo air raid during World War II

Yoriko Suzuki, who died at the age of 87 in June, lamented about how her life and those of many others were turned upside down by the war.
Hakuyo at Kokugikan in Tokyo the day before his first tournament in professional sumo in May 2014.
SUMO / INSIDE SUMO
Sep 10, 2025

What drives sumo journeymen to endure one of the world's most grueling sports

Professional sumo is one of the harshest environments in sports. Yet many toil away in the sport's lower-tier divisions for years or even decades.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Swastika Jajoo (fourth from right) began attending the daily radio calisthenics routine at Sendai’s Kitasanbancho Park and struck up unexpected friendships with a group of elderly residents.
COMMUNITY / Voices / FOREIGN AGENDA
Sep 15, 2025

Calisthenic companions bridge cultures and generations

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a doctoral student in Sendai found friendship in unexpected places.
Made at a time when Japan was still grappling with Yukio Mishima’s legacy, Paul Schrader’s biopic “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” was blocked from screening in the country for decades.
CULTURE / Film
Nov 6, 2025

A 40-year wait for ‘Mishima’ ends at TIFF

Paul Schrader’s 1985 biopic of the radical author Yukio Mishima finds its Japanese audience at last.
The Toyota buyout is a major test for Japan’s reforms
Akio Toyoda, chairman of Toyota Motor, speaks during a media preview at the Japan Mobility Show in Tokyo on Oct. 29. Minority investors are challenging the carmaker's bid to take affiliate Toyota Industries Corp. private.
New satellite images suggest 'mass graves' in Sudan's El-Fasher
A general view of a berm construction in Kinin Village near El-Fasher.
From France to Mali, a deportee's struggle far from home
Moussa Sacko, a Malian deported from France — where he had lived since he was a young child — stands on a street in Bamako, Mali, in December. Compared with his home in France, Bamako feels like a different planet, Sacko said.
High-speed rail is expensive and difficult, but seen as a key to growth
Achal Khare, former managing director at India’s National High Speed Rail Corporation, gives a presentation during the IHRA Forum 2025 in Tokyo on Oct. 23.
Takaichi calls for the updating of Japan's economic security law
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi speaks to a panel on promoting economic security in Japan on Friday.
Cleanliness gets competitive at Tokyo’s Spogomi world cup
On Oct. 29, teams from 33 qualifying countries scoured the streets of Shibuya for all manners of trash as part of the Spogomi litter-picking competition.
Jon Homewood: ‘There’s beauty in what we throw away’
After a peripatetic childhood around the world, teacher and artist Jon Homewood ended up coming to Japan in 2012 for a professional opportunity.
Yokozuna duo Onosato and Hoshoryu poised for another clash of titans
Yokozuna duo Onosato (right) and Hoshoryu clash for the title on the final day of the Autumn Grand Sumo Tournament on Sept. 28 at Ryogoku Kokugikan.
High-speed rail is expensive and difficult, but seen as a key to growth
Achal Khare, former managing director at India’s National High Speed Rail Corporation, gives a presentation during the IHRA Forum 2025 in Tokyo on Oct. 23.
A 40-year wait for ‘Mishima’ ends at TIFF
Made at a time when Japan was still grappling with Yukio Mishima’s legacy, Paul Schrader’s biopic “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” was blocked from screening in the country for decades.

Podcast

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.
Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Longform

Bear attacks have dominated Japanese news headlines in recent months, with 13 people so far having been killed by the animals.
Japan’s bears have been on their killing spree for more than 100 years
By Yukana Inoue

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Foreign wrestlers have a long history in sumo
Foreign wrestlers have a long history in sumo

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