Japanese women must bring about radical change in their country's health-care culture to stem a worrisome increase in breast cancer, a prominent cancer-awareness advocate said ahead of Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October. According to the National Cancer Center in Tokyo, about one woman in ...
Few things were as emblematic of 1980s America as "breaking," the inner-city dance style whose head-spinning and somersaulting acrobatics became a world sensation. Break-dancing -- or "b-boying," as its creators call it -- along with rap music, graffiti, "beat-boxing" (creating beats and music with the ...
The phrase "textbook row" has become a regular sighting in Japanese newspapers of late, as newly authorized history books for schools are accused, both at home and abroad, of "glossing over" the bloodier aspects of this country's warmongering, Imperialist past. Few outside the nation's classrooms ...
Koya Azumi leans over the living-room table at his home outside Tokyo on a warm afternoon, stirring coffee. Birds twitter outside, but otherwise there is only silence. It is a tableau of serenity, of peace. But then, speaking softly, Azumi, a retired professor of sociology ...
Every Sunday evening finds Masamichi Shida among a group of antiwar protesters outside the train station in Kamakura, south of Tokyo, singing songs opposing Japan's participation in the U.S.-led campaign in Iraq. Shida, 78, deplores war because he knows war, having served as a World ...
For depression sufferers, medicines to relieve their misery are nothing less than godsends. So they are, too, for those firms pumping ever-more antidepressants into the drug-friendly Japanese market. But it wasn't always that way. Although Japan is the world's second-largest pharmaceuticals market behind the United ...
Ever since the first edition of the monthly photojournalism magazine Days Japan was published just over a year ago, the same motto has appeared in the corner of every glossy cover: "A single photograph has the power to change the course of a nation." If ...
If you are a documentary filmmaker, one surefire way to impress viewers is to expose some aspect of your chosen subject that conventional reporting chooses to ignore. That's the approach that Swedish videographer Simon Klose decided to take when he packed his camera and ...
When the four floors of the Nakano Broadway shotengai opened for business in October 1966, resident retailers went for a high-class image in the hopes of attracting a wealthy clientele. Well-to-do customers did visit from the luxury condos located directly above the shopping center ...
While Japan's auto industry is forever being feted, the country's far-bigger pachinko business -- which takes a staggering 30 trillion yen a year in bets -- is almost entirely overlooked by society and the wider world. So, aficionados of pachislot -- a variety of pachinko ...
