With surprisingly little fanfare, the Japan Meteorological Agency, which keeps tabs on tens of thousands of earthquakes a year, has been setting up a network of ultra-sensitive electronic motion detectors that will pick up on the kind of minute seismic quivering that heralds a ...
One chilly Friday morning last month, high-school teacher Noriyuki Ishida had probably the most stressful experience of his 35-year career. His paymasters, the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education, had summoned the geography instructor and four others to attend a two-hour "study course." The official ...
The 90-minute event on the eighth floor of an electronics shop in Tokyo's Akihabara district one recent Sunday afternoon was unlike anything you'd expect to encounter in the bubble-gum world of Japanese teen fashion. Sure, up-and-coming fashion models Miho Asada, Yurika Harada and Manami Ute ...
One year ago this month, an advance team from Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) arrived in Iraq on a mission -- so the Japanese public was told -- to help rebuild the wartorn country. The rest of the main contingent of 600 troops soon ...
Seated elegantly at a table in a Tokyo cafe, 37-year-old Kazumi Nakazawa is recalling the brief period seven years ago when it wasn't obvious her marriage was doomed. That was back before her husband, a surgeon two years her senior, began checking up on ...
It is a condition that many married Japanese know all too well. The wedding bells fell silent years ago and the lovingly framed photo -- she in her gown, he in his tux -- has long since been put away in a drawer. The couple has ...
Champions of conventional concepts of matrimony may well be shocked -- dismayed, even -- by the current slew of stories in Japanese magazines detailing just how likely the nation's married women are to have sex outside their marriages. "Get over it," says Myongan Kim, founder ...
Masatoshi Hoshino, a 56-year-old distribution company manager in Tokyo, had an arranged marriage 16 years ago to a woman he met just six months before. Things went well. At first the chemistry was strong and they had sex up to three times a week. ...
As he was growing up, Shinsuke Horiuchi assumed marriage and physical affection went hand-in-hand. Then wedlock showed him how wrong he was. Horiuchi, 50, says his wife has been on a sex strike for 13 years. And now -- as soft-spoken as this bespectacled city ...
Hiroko Kataoka is a cosmopolitan 35-year-old who has lived abroad and was working at a prestigious investment bank in Tokyo when she met Masaki, 36, at a corporate party. Hiroko and Masaki, a conservative-minded salaryman from western Japan, had very different personalities: He was an ...
