Situated alongside a rundown strip club and a tailor's store that sews screaming eagles onto the backs of military jackets, Gallery Rougheryet in the city of Okinawa might well scare away potential artists — but not Mao Ishikawa. Dressed in a bright red Spiderman ...
On Sept. 26, Nago City Council became the first municipality on Okinawa to adopt an official resolution calling for the governments of Japan and the United States to conduct an investigation into the spraying and storage of Agent Orange on the island. The councilors' unanimous ...
When Caethe Goetz was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare form of bone marrow cancer, at age 49 in 2003, both she and her doctor were perplexed. The disease affects only 20,000 Americans a year, typically African-American males in their late 60s. Goetz's family has ...
Nestled in the upmarket Wada district of Tokyo's Suginami Ward, Renkoji Temple is a model of gentility. On weekday mornings, pensioners sit and sketch its prayer hall while housewives chat quietly in the shade of its well-tended trees. Given this setting, it would be ...
In the late 1960s, the U.S. military buried dozens of barrels of the toxic defoliant Agent Orange in an area around the town of Chatan on Okinawa Island, an American veteran has told The Japan Times. The former serviceman's claim comes only days after Foreign ...
"The Towering Inferno." "Deep Impact." "The Road." Hollywood's notion of how communities react to a disaster is unequivocal: People panic, societies collapse and enemies take advantage of the chaos to settle old scores. Had these cinematic assessments of the human character been accurate, then what ...
Bhavuk SethiProfessional gambler, 27 (American)This is my first time to volunteer for anything like this. Luckily my job gives me the flexibility to take time off. I'm finding volunteering much more fulfilling than playing poker for a living. Daiki TamuraDJ, 28 (Japanese)This is my hometown, ...
Since its formation in the wake of the 2004 Sumatra tsunami, American nonprofit organization All Hands has dispatched more than 6,000 volunteers to the scenes of more than a dozen disasters across the globe. While these teams are accustomed to encountering tough conditions — ...
During the 30-minute ferry ride from Motobu on mainland Okinawa, Iejima reveals itself in stages. First, Mount Tacchu emerges above the waves like a chunk of the peanut brittle for which the island is renowned. Next, the wind-blown scent of countless thousands of hibiscuses ...
Long before the theory of plate tectonics emerged in the 20th century to explain the mechanism behind earthquakes, Japanese folklore had attributed the terrifying phenomenon to the thrashings of the o-namazu — a giant catfish that inhabited the bowels of the Earth. And the sole ...
