Japan's first convenience store was not, as many suppose, 7-Eleven in Tokyo in 1974 but Mitsui in Kyoto in 1673. The genius behind it was Mitsui Hachirobei, heir to the sake shop his father had opened a generation earlier. Of samurai birth, the father saw ...
It's a fake world. Alternatively: All the world's a stage. One day two years ago (as Shukan Bunshun magazine reported recently) a 76-year-old woman got something in the mail. A business pamphlet of some sort, something about an "investment diamond" — if she would buy ...
A man in his 80s suffering mild dementia (the story is courtesy of Shukan Gendai magazine) is cared for by his wife, also in her 80s. She's exhausted. Caregiving drains the prime of life, let alone the end of it. The man is ...
Japan has lost something. That's a stark but uncontroversial statement. Few whose memory goes back a generation or more will disagree. Controversy arises when the talk turns to what was lost; when, how and why it was lost; whether the nation is the better ...
In American newspapers, wire services, cable TV and blogs, U.S. President Donald Trump is beset by a host of recurring brickbats, from complaints over his refusal to make public his income tax returns and alleged Russian connections, to his reputation as a male chauvinist ...
Is time carrying us forward, or backward? Or both at once? Technology propels us forward, politics thrusts us back. In east Asia, World War II reverberates. Elsewhere, as the Ukraine crisis unfolds, the Cold War, history only yesterday, looks today like tomorrow's threat.
