Eighty kilometers from Oi, Fukui Prefecture, is the village of Sanno, Hyogo Prefecture — 11 households, population 42, average age 60 plus. There's nothing special about Oi except for its nuclear reactors, one of which earlier this month became the first to be reactivated since ...
Freed June 7 from 15 years' imprisonment for a murder he apparently never committed, Govinda Prasad Mainali declared himself full of gratitude. Speaking through his lawyer, he said, "Mujitsu, shinjitsu wo shinjite kureta saibankan ni deaete yokatta. Kansha no kimochi de ippai desu," (「無実、真実を信じてくれた裁判官に出会ってよかった。感謝の気持ちでいっぱいです"」"It's ...
No love, no sex, no marriage, no kids — such, in glum outline, is Japan today. It's too bleak a picture, it can't be true! But it can't be false either. If it were, people would be marrying, making babies and having love ...
One of the enduring mysteries of the Aum Shinrikyo atrocities of the 1990s is the ease with which the cult attracted members. The arrest this month of the last two fugitives allegedly involved in Aum's fatal 1995 sarin gas assault on the Tokyo subway ...
"If you don't like it, quit." That ill-tempered remark, lately uttered by Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto, echoes a sentiment frequently encountered in people in authority — but how true is it? How free are we to "quit" what we don't like? Hashimoto was addressing the 513 ...
THE OKINAWAN DIASPORA IN JAPAN: Crossing the Borders Within, by Steve Rabson. University of Hawai'i Press, 2012, 312 pp., $55.00 (hardcover) Okinawa, mainland Japan's subtropical playground, is no paradise to Okinawans. Ryukyu, the archipelago's original name, means "circle of jewels." Lush appearance is one thing, ...
Two things make a battered Japan cringe: genpatsu (原発, nuclear power) and fukeiki (不景気, economic stagnation). The nation has suffered deeply from both. As spring fades into a potentially sweltering, potentially stagnant summer, there arises an agonizing dilemma: Can the latter be avoided, or ...
So it's come to this: "Prison is heaven, freedom is hell." A country of which this can reasonably be said is in sad straits. Can it be reasonably said of Japan? It's the subhead of a recent article in Shukan Shincho magazine whose main ...
No one who remembers the ganguro (black-face) girls of the mid to late 1990s will be shocked by Friday magazine's little article on the hadeko (loud kids) of today, but it all gives rise to a bemusing question: How did the age-old quest for ...
PERFORMING THE GREAT PEACE: Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan, by Luke S. Roberts. University of Hawai'i Press, 2012, 263 pp., $49.00 (hardcover) "...a daimyo could be both dead and alive at the same time..." One of the rewards of studying Japan's past ...
