Yoko Sakata was an ordinary "office lady," not earning much and not aspiring to much, when she began suspecting her boyfriend of having an affair. She hired a private detective, who confirmed her fears and then paid her a compliment: "You have good intuition." ...
"Sekai wa itsuka hitotsu ni naru" (「世界はいつかひとつになる」) — that's what "And the world will be as one," from John Lennon's "Imagine," sounds like in Japanese, at least according to the Asahi Shimbun. The matter arises in connection with the dai sanjukkai orinpikku kyogitaikai (第三十回オリンピック競技大会, ...
August, that most searing of months, compels us to reflect on the atom. Japan was atom-bombed twice in August 67 years ago, and Hiroshima since 1952 and Nagasaki since 1955 have hosted solemn anniversary ceremonies to keep the memory alive in the hope of ...
AFTER CAMP: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics, by Greg Robinson. University of California Press, 2012, 328 pp., $27.95 (paperback) "A Jap is a Jap." Franklin Roosevelt didn't say that — West Coast Defense commander General John Dewitt did. But Roosevelt acted on ...
Here's an idea: we all retire at 40. Not "retire" exactly, in the current sense of the word. Let's say at 40, we withdraw temporarily from the salaried grind and — fantastic thought! — go back to school, upgrade or deepen our knowledge and skills, ...
He left no isho (遺書, suicide note), so his deepest feelings can only be guessed — first from his jisatsu (自殺, suicide) at age 13, and secondly from the testimony of dōkyūsei (同級生, classmates) elicited in a tardy and grudging school and police investigation into the case. ...
"Democracy is so popular these days!" — "The Democracy Song," 1919 One hundred years ago this week — on July 30, 1912 — Emperor Meiji passed away and Japan, traveling blind and hardly knowing where it was going, entered a new age. The Taisho Era (1912-26), ...
In the summer of 1918, "rice riots" swept the country. They began in a fishing village on the Sea of Japan in remote Toyama Prefecture. By September, some 2 million people in hundreds of municipalities had taken to the streets. They looted, bombed, ...
"Japan's Worst-Case Scenarios" — that's the title of the lead feature in the July issue of the monthly Takarajima. No one writing on such a theme need fear a shortage of material. The magazine easily fills 40 pages analyzing catastrophes and catastrophes-in-waiting: Tokyo leveled ...
Party politics seems as natural to many of us today as government itself, but imagine how it looked to the uninitiated 150 years ago. "A perplexing institution was representative government," wrote Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835-1901), Japan's great popularizer of Western civilization. In England in 1862 as ...
