Tag - yamagata-prefecture

 
 

YAMAGATA PREFECTURE

Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / 20 QUESTIONS
Dec 11, 2021
Nour Eldin Sultan: ‘Listening and lending your support is the best thing you can do to help someone’
Nour Eldin Sultan came to Japan, fell in love with Yamagata Prefecture and ended up becoming the first Arab Muslim to be elected to a local prefectural assembly.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Crime & Legal
Apr 6, 2017
Ex-NHK reporter issued fresh arrest warrant over third case of rape
A former NHK reporter charged in two rapes was served a fresh arrest warrant Thursday on suspicion of committing a third, police said.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink
Feb 12, 2016
Happiness is a warm farm: How home cooking is reviving rural Yamagata
It's late January in Tokyo, and a rare 6-centimeter snowfall plunges the city's famously efficient transport network into chaos. Train lines report delays of up to four hours, leaving snaking lines of frustrated commuters steaming, despite the freezing temperatures.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Nov 8, 2014
Yamadera: 1,000-step staircase to paradise
We're only a few minutes into our climb up one of Yamagata Prefecture's holy mountains, Mount Hojusan, and already our pace has slowed considerably. Our destination is Risshakuji Temple, more colloquially known as Yamadera (literally: "mountain temple"), a far-north outpost of Tendai Buddhism since 860. To reach the promised vistas from the mountain's peak, however, requires tackling a series of staircases totaling more than 1,000 steps.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Aug 23, 2014
Cheap train to the north with Basho
On July 19, the Yamagata Shinkansen debuted a luxury ashiya (foot bath) service. A ticket from Tokyo to Yamagata City, in Tohoku Prefecture, costs around ¥11,000, but 15 minutes in the foot bath car is extra. If Matsuo Basho, Japan's most well-known poet, were to retrace his 156-day-long trek through Tohoku in 1689 — described in his masterwork "Oku no Hosomichi" ("The Narrow Road to the Deep North") — he probably wouldn't spring for the shinkansen, much less the foot bath. He'd likely opt for the comparatively spartan Seishun 18 (seishun jūhachi kippu, literally, the youthful 18 ticket), which gets you five nonconsecutive days of travel on all local and rapid Japan Railway trains for ¥11,850. This five-day ticket lets you bend "your steps in whatever direction" you wish — to quote Basho in "Utatsu Kiko" ("The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel").
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Jan 16, 2014
Planned demolition bonds mark end of era
After educating children since 1956, Kiyokawa Elementary School stands abandoned, its walls and roof crumbling because there are no longer enough pupils to fill it and the town can't afford to demolish the building.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Nov 9, 2013
Stairway to heavenly Haguro
Some of the more interesting spots in Japan are the ones that are not really on the way to anywhere else at all. A sense of remoteness and being firmly off the beaten track lends them a particularly beguiling character.
JAPAN / Society
Jun 29, 2013
Anti-Korean group's plea to use public facility nixed
Yamagata Prefecture has turned down a request from anti-Korean activists to use a public building for a meeting.

Longform

Later this month, author Shogo Imamura will open Honmaru, a bookstore that allows other businesses to rent its shelves. It's part of a wave of ideas Japanese booksellers are trying to compete with online spaces.
The story isn't over for Japan's bookstores