In the United States today, it is no longer radical to suggest that the next president could be a woman. In Nordic countries, no husband would rail at a pregnant wife who expected him to share child-raising duties. And female heads of state are ...
Every foreigner in Japan learns one thing pretty quickly: This being the land of harmony, courtesy trumps candor. Hanging back works best, everywhere and every time. Imogen M. Greene, though, has little time for such niceties. That's because Greene -- an American who has lived in ...
I nervously typed the numbers onto the Web site -- first my height, then my weight. I held my breath and clicked "Calculate." "Your BMI: 25.4," was the clinical response from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's body-mass-index calculator. In other words: "Happy New ...
Amid the string of child murders across Japan in recent weeks, the bizarre story of an 18-year-old girl in Fukuoka Prefecture, allegedly confined almost all her life and beaten by her mother, has all but gone unnoticed. And as Japanese media focus attention on the ...
It's 9:58 on a chilly Wednesday morning, and it looks like I am the first of the day's visitors to Chiba Zoological Park. Why, you may well wonder, am I hanging around out here on a weekday morning in midwinter, when I could be sitting ...
Japan and South Korea are like an old, bickering couple: Though they may want to part ways at times, their shared history and interdependency compel them to work things out. That, and they've got no place else to go. So maybe it's no surprise that ...
Gerard Matthew has broad shoulders and beefy hands. He's built like a bear. Yet as sturdy as this 31-year-old may look, he is a very sick man. Matthew suffers, for example, from facial swelling, double and triple vision, muscle weakness, bouts of extreme anger that ...
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi led his Liberal Democratic Party to a landslide victory in the Sept. 11 general election he called as a de facto referendum on his drive to privatize postal services. But if veteran commentator Soichiro Tahara is right, Koizumi's poll triumph did ...
I arrived at "Dialog in the Dark" not knowing what to expect. Sure, the Web site for this unusual installation, sponsored by the nonprofit organization Dialog in the Dark Japan, had provided a hint of background: Visitors to the Tokyo venue, it said, would spend ...
Growing old can be difficult, especially if you are in an alien land. But in the Netherlands, famous for its openness toward other nationalities, one organization is trying to make that plight a little easier. The cultural diversity at De Schildershoek public nursing home, ...
