Everybody's hooked on something. What's life without its little pleasures? Mere struggle for survival. Smokers crave nicotine, coffee-drinkers caffeine, gamers games. The pursuit of happiness takes many forms. Society approves of most, frowns on others. Some it bans outright. One Golden Week morning in 2016, ...
"Japanese travel more often than other people," wrote Engelbert Kaempfer, the 17th-century physician, scholar, naturalist and explorer whose "History of Japan" (1712) was the first full-length foreign-language portrait of the nation.
Japan's three leading newspapers, disagreeing on much, agree on this: Japan's democracy is in crisis. "Democratic politics in Japan has become frayed," the Mainichi Shimbun said in an editorial on Jan. 1. "The recent deterioration of Diet deliberations is intolerable," the Yomiuri Shimbun said on Jan. ...
"Some say that though Kobo Daishi (Kukai) left this life he did not die, that he lies uncorrupted in (his tomb on Mount Koya) under these ancient trees, awaiting the coming of the future Buddha who will signal the salvation of the world" — ...
Sleep. Those to whom it comes effortlessly can't imagine the yearning it inspires. The more you yearn for it, the further it recedes. The further it recedes, the more you yearn for it. It becomes everything in life. All other goals pale beside it. Oh, ...
The girl was 15, the teacher in his early 30s. He recognized her ability, encouraged her, befriended her, seduced her. He took her to a love hotel and said, "This is what grown-ups do." The story appeared in the Asahi Shimbun last month in a ...
Life is tragic, life is comic; the glass is half-empty — no, half full. Point of view is all. Two magazines — President and Spa — represent the opposite poles of optimism and pessimism. For President, bad luck and good luck are all in ...
If the year-end seems less festive than foreboding, escape through the poems of the "Koshinsu," Japan's earliest poetic anthologies.
The world is furious. From Hong Kong to Chile, Indonesia to Bolivia, France to Iraq, Haiti to Iran, Egypt to Peru, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, have declared war on their governments and social systems, decrying dictatorship, corruption, mismanagement, incompetence, inequality, numbness to ...
The BBC in October published a glowing encomium to Japanese cleanliness. "How," it asks, "does Japan stay so clean?" It's deeply ingrained, the report explains. Shinto purifies the body, Buddhism cleanses the mind, the tea ceremony sweeps the last speck of dust from the rustic ...
