An aging sumo wrestler, food poisoning risks and safeguarding pets from COVID-19
Warning: A portion of this contribution deals with suicide, which some readers may find distressing. In this age of medical miracles, it has become increasingly common to read accounts of women who have given birth in their 60s or even 70s. For professional sumo wrestlers, ...
Olympics and UFOs can't shift COVID-19 from the spotlight
First, some glum news: John Coates, head of the International Olympic Committee’s coordination commission, was quoted in The Australian on May 21 as expressing doubt over prospects for the Tokyo Olympics to be held in summer next year. Coates went on record as saying ...
Resignation raises uncomfortable questions about Japan prosecutors' powers
The public and the media cried foul because Kurokawa was seen to be sympathetic to the interests of the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
In a rare move, entertainers air criticism of Japan's response to COVID-19 crisis
Members of the show business industry usually avoid anything smacking of politics so as not to jeopardize employment opportunities.
A pandemic potpourri of Golden Week news gems
As if the COVID-19 pandemic didn't give Japan enough things to worry about, the unseasonably warm winter and resulting lack of snow may spell severe shortages of water by this summer.
Pundits pore over pandemic's impact on employment
Asahi Geino warns warns that economic calamities from the COVID-19 outbreak are likely to arrive in the form of three successive waves. The third wave, if it comes, will make the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987 seem like a picnic.
Counting the cost of postponing the Tokyo Olympics
Nearly a month before the decision was announced to postpone the 2020 Olympics, the media was already speculating over their fate. On Feb. 24, the headline in Nikkan Gendai read, “Relinquishing of the Tokyo Olympics would mean ¥20 trillion in economic losses.” Noting that a ...
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, ...
Why are Japan’s millennials shunning alcohol?
Some time before the coronavirus outbreak put a damper on this year’s hanami (blossom viewing) parties and other social activities, the media had already noted that the decline in alcohol consumption by younger Japanese has been accelerating. This phenomenon even made the front page ...
The panic buying of toiletries: It's like 1973 all over again
Where are all the masks? And where's the toilet paper? Nikkei Business (Feb. 28) suggested that panic buying in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, which also occurred in eastern Japan following the catastrophic earthquake of March 2011, may be influenced in part by ...
Kansai businesses suffer as COVID-19 alarm hurts tourism
The Japanese expression "kankodori ga naku" (literally, "the cuckoo sings") is frequently used to describe a business slump. "Kankodori" appears in a headline in Flash (Feb. 18) concerning Nara Park. Not only are visitor numbers to this destination way down, but the famous deer that ...
Tetsu Nakamura's death in Afghanistan exposes a gap of perception in Japan
Following the assassination of Dr. Tetsu Nakamura in Afghanistan earlier this month, the government of Afghanistan held a memorial ceremony for him as his body was delivered to the airplane that would take it out of the country. President Ashraf Ghani was one of ...
