Face masks can foster a false sense of security
What’s happening in Japan is written all over our faces — our blank, expressionless, masked faces. Never before, it seems safe to say, have so many people gone about masked. Thus we confront the microbes that assault us. Are the microbes disconcerted? It seems not. “As self-protection, ...
2018: Year of the 800-pound Gorilla
Four topics dominated Japan's non-Twitter news cycle for the last quarter of 2017. Two involved sports: the signing of 23-year-old baseball superstar Shohei Otani to play for the Los Angeles Angels of the American League; and the resignation of sumo grand champion Harumafuji after ...
Showa's not giving up without a fight
The government has decided that the 31st year of Heisei will end with the abdication of Emperor Akihito 120 days into 2019, on April 30. Then on May 1, Crown Prince Naruhito will become emperor and a new nengō (name of the period of ...
On the quest for the holy grail for as long as we live
Is death inevitable? True, everyone born before Aug. 4, 1900, has proved mortal (the world's oldest-known living person, a Japanese woman named Nabi Tajima, was born on that date). But the past is only an imperfect guide to the future, as the effervescent present ...
Magazines hold their own against TV's 'iron chefs'
Prior to Japan's switch-over to full digital TV broadcasting in 2011, a number of industry insiders were already voicing concerns about how the new technology would affect their bottom line. With expanded bandwidth and additional channels, what — aside from reruns of old programs ...
Prepare for the future, at your convenience
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 ...
Keep your eyes and ears open, and hands inside your pockets
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 ...
Living through the golden years has lost its sheen
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 ...
Corporate zombies need 'rich brains'
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 ...
Donald Trump's 'first 100 days' is down for the count
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 ...
Japan's future may be stunted by its past
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.
