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September 10, 2025
 

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TRANSLATION

“Swallows” examines the intersections of class and reproductive issues with a focus on its protagonist who is talked into becoming a surrogate for a wealthy couple.
CULTURE / Books
Sep 5, 2025
‘Swallows' untangles the murky ethics of selling motherhood
“Swallows” examines the intersections of class and reproductive issues with a focus on its protagonist who is talked into becoming a surrogate for a wealthy couple.
“Sympathy Tower Tokyo” is centered around Sara Machina, a star architect designing a new experimental prison in central Tokyo.
CULTURE / Books
Aug 30, 2025
ChatGPT controversy is the least interesting part of 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo'
In Rie Qudan’s futuristic Tokyo, AI and architects take on the prison system.
Jesse Kirkwood is part of a vibrant field of translators who have nurtured what might be called a “post-Murakami era of Japanese literature and translation,” one book at a time.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / 20 QUESTIONS
Aug 29, 2025
Jesse Kirkwood: ‘Languages are entire cultural universes with all sorts of baggage’
The Japanese-English literary translator reflects on catching the recent wave of “post-Murakami” fiction and how he balances reading for work versus pleasure.
Akira Otani's genre-bending novel "The Night of Baba Yaga" takes place in Japan’s 1970s yakuza underworld and centers on the daughter of a mob boss and a ruthless martial arts fighter who serves as her bodyguard.
CULTURE / Entertainment news
Jul 4, 2025
Queer-coded yakuza story wins prestigious U.K. crime writing award
With “The Night of Baba Yaga,” Akira Otani is the first Japanese writer to win the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Award for crime fiction in translation.
Shingo Kato, assistant manager at Homechigiru Driving School in Ise, Mie Prefecture, rides in a training vehicle with a smartphone equipped with the school’s translation app.
JAPAN / Regional voices: Chubu
Jun 30, 2025
Translation apps help break language barriers at Chubu driving schools
Some driving schools have refused enrollment of foreign nationals with limited Japanese skills, sources have said.
Seicho Matsumoto’s “Suspicion” is based on a true story known as “the Beppu 300 million yen insurance murder,” swapping the real-life husband with a former Tokyo hostess.
CULTURE / Books
May 25, 2025
Truth is slippery in ‘Suspicion,’ a detective story based on a true crime
Seicho Matsumoto’s mystery novella is based on 1974’s “Beppu 300 million yen insurance murder.”
Not only is the drawing of each frame an important part of the manga-making process, translation has increasingly demanded more attention as the art form gains popularity overseas.
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
May 23, 2025
Manga translators walk a fine line between meaning and mayhem
Manga translators face linguistic puzzles, cultural minefields and online backlash — all for the love of a perfectly written speech bubble.
Yuki Tejima, who runs the Instagram account booknerdtokyo, hesitated to try her hand at literary translation until she won an award at the International Translation Contest.
CULTURE / Books
Mar 29, 2025
Yuki Tejima's metamorphosis from bookworm to literary translator
An Instagram “bookfluencer” and professional translator for over 10 years, Tejima’s love of books was, strangely enough, a hurdle to working in literary translation.
Novelist Genki Kawamura wrote in the dedication to his “One Hundred Flowers” novel that his grandmother’s memories “bloomed like a hundred flowers” at the close of her life.
CULTURE / Books
Mar 22, 2025
'One Hundred Flowers': A moving exploration of loss, love and living with dementia
Author Genki Kawamura drew inspiration from his grandmother's experiences to thoughtfully portray a woman suffering from dementia in his novel.
“The Place of Shells” takes place mostly in Gottingen, Germany, where both the author and the book's narrator live, while also jumping both geographically and temporally to Sendai, Japan, through memories of the 3/11 disaster and its aftermath.
CULTURE / Books
Mar 10, 2025
Grief ebbs and flows between two tragedies in 'The Place of Shells'
Mai Ishizawa’s debut novel, which won one of the three Akutagawa Prizes awarded in 2021, is also her first to be released in English, translated by Polly Barton.
“May You Have Delicious Meals” focuses on a trio of young office workers at the same workplace who have mixed feelings for food and each other.
CULTURE / Books
Mar 8, 2025
‘May You Have Delicious Meals’: The ugly taste of office and gender politics
The English-language debut of Junko Takase’s Akutagawa Prize-winning novel serves complex prose in translation by Morgan Giles.
The concept of diversity isn't foreign to Japanese people, but new ways of referring to the practice in society might be.
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Feb 9, 2025
DEI, woke and 'forest bathing': When a direct translation just won't cut it
Take a three-step approach that includes context and nuance when describing buzzwords and complicated terminology.
Jay Rubin’s new translation of Haruki Murakami’s “End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland,” in part set in a walled city where inhabitants’ shadows are forcibly removed, speaks to the author’s quirky, exhaustive attention to detail when rendering his imaginative world on the page.
CULTURE / Books
Dec 16, 2024
Jay Rubin takes us back to Haruki Murakami's world
A new translation of “End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland” brings the fan favorite closer to the original Japanese text.
"Butter," Asako Yuzuki’s thrilling novel inspired by a real-life femme fatale, was named the Waterstones Book of the Year in 2024.
CULTURE / Books / 2024 in Review
Dec 15, 2024
Women are writing a new chapter in Japanese literature in the 2020s
From the deadly serious and deeply weird to the fluffiest of diversions, a bounty of Japanese fiction in translation has delighted readers and critics this decade so far.
Aomori-based writer JJ Carter presented on tabletop gaming as creative inspiration for building characters and narratives.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Nov 18, 2024
In Fukushima, a weekend of prose, poetry and translation
The latest edition of the Japan Writers Conference was a friendly forum for anglophone writers to connect and converse.
Taiwanese writer Yang Shuang-zi’s novel “Taiwan Travelogue” provides a portal to the past and allows the reader to explore a bygone world with their eyes, ears and stomach.
CULTURE / Books
Nov 15, 2024
The sentimental gastronomies of ‘Taiwan Travelogue’
Yang Shuang-zi’s layered tale of female companionship takes readers on an epicurean frolic through Taiwan's colonial era.
Context has always been the key to successfully translating a video game from Japanese to English. Recently, though, cultural sensitivities come into play as well.
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Oct 17, 2024
How your favorite Japanese video games are translated into English
Localizers have to grapple with challenging issues of tone and nuance. Even a simple "thank you" may not be what it seems.
South Korean author Han Kang, the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, attends a press conference, in Seoul in November.
CULTURE / Books
Oct 11, 2024
Han Kang’s Nobel win underscores essential role of translators as literary tastemakers
The trailblazing South Korean author was virtually unknown in the West just 10 years ago — then came Deborah Smith’s translation of "The Vegetarian."
Aziz Ahmed talks about young language carers in Maebashi City, Gunma Prefecture, on Sept. 18.
JAPAN / Society
Oct 5, 2024
Young language carer hopes to support others facing hardships in Japan
Aziz Ahmed came to Japan from Pakistan at the age of 9 and remembers the hardships he faced interpreting for family members who do not speak Japanese.
An electronic sign developed by Mitsubishi Electric displays announcements in multiple languages at a factory in Tokyo on Tuesday.
BUSINESS / Companies
Sep 10, 2024
Mitsubishi Electric develops multilingual translation system for meetings
The firm hopes the system will be used when information needs to be related accurately to a large number of workers, including non-Japanese ones.
Japan eyes two types of 'hometown resident' registration
People buy groceries from a mobile supermarket in a rural area of Nagomi, Kumamoto Prefecture. The government is considering a new "hometown resident" registration system to help strengthen regional revitalization measures.
Ed Sheeran teams up with Tokyo’s Oedo Line
The “Oh! Ed! Collaboration Campaign,” launched on Tokyo's Keio Line to celebrate the Friday release of Ed Sheeran’s latest album, “Play,” includes a eight-car train dedicated to the pop star's music and trivia related to his career
Why more hotels in Japan are offering room-only service
Nipponia Hotel Ise Kawasaki Merchant Town in Ise, Mie Prefecture
Search is on for loopholes in Japan’s $550 billion investment pledge
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick argues that U.S. President Donald Trump has sole authority to invest Japan's promised $550 billion.
Race to become next LDP president kicks off again
Former Liberal Democratic Party Secretary-General Toshimitsu Motegi on Monday became the first to enter the race to replace Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba.
Shizuoka farmers fight to preserve sustainable tea method that’s steeped in tradition
As of August 2024, the number of confirmed chagusaba farmers had fallen to 302, just over half the 582 reported in 2015, according to the Shizuoka Chagusaba Farming Method Promotion Council.
Search is on for loopholes in Japan’s $550 billion investment pledge
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick argues that U.S. President Donald Trump has sole authority to invest Japan's promised $550 billion.
In rural Hokkaido, the stops and starts of tourism revival on full display
Redevelopment plans for Kawayu Onsen have hit some snags — an example of how bringing tourists back to declining rural communities is far from easy work.
London’s calling and sumo’s top division — along with Hello Kitty — are ready to answer
Yokozuna Hoshoryu and Hello Kitty, an ambassador for sumo's upcoming tour to London, at Tokyo's Kokugikan on Tuesday
Resonac creates 27-member consortium to pursue advanced chip developments
Representatives from member companies of JOINT3, a consortium working together on semiconductor-related developments announced by Resonac, pose for a photo in Tokyo on Wednesday.

Podcast

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

Longform

Figure skater Akiko Suzuki was once told her ideal weight should be 47 kilograms, a number she now admits she “naively believed.” This led to her have a relationship with food that resulted in her suffering from anorexia.
The silent battle Japanese athletes fight with weight
By Mai Yoshikawa

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

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

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