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Washington alienated by Tokyo rightists
South Korean President Park Geun-hye's rhetoric proved to have an impressive reach on a recent visit to the US. A series of speeches in Washington caused a panic in Japan, far across the Pacific.The panic stemmed from a declaration at a banquet where Park expressed her willingness to address the North Korea issue in concerted efforts with China and the US after the North suspends its ...
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Pacy racing pigeon Bolt sets new world record
Pope Francis’ fascination with the devil took on remarkable new twists Tuesday, with a well-known exorcist insisting Francis helped ';liberate'; a Mexican man possessed by four different demons despite the Vatican’s insistence that no such papal exorcism took place. The case concerns a 43-year-old ...
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Ai Weiwei uses obscenity-filled music video to mock state power in China
BEIJING - Two emotionless prison guards watch Ai Weiwei as he eats, sleeps, paces, showers — and even sits on the toilet — in the artist’s new obscenity-filled, metaphor-rich music video mocking China’s state power. The video accompanying the visual artist’s single ';Dumbass'; — released Wednesday but blocked online in mainland China — is ...
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30 of indecent assault victims were staring at mobiles
About 30 percent of victims of indecent assaults in Osaka last year were using cellphones, smartphones or portable music players at the time of the attack, Osaka Prefectural Police investigative sources said. Of some 860 indecent assaults reported in 2012 to the prefectural force, about 14 percent of the victims said they were using mobile or smartphones and another 15 percent said they were ...
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Olympus fears compact camera sales will keep falling
Olympus Corp. fears sales of its compact cameras may fall by half next fiscal year, extending a decline as consumers increasingly use smartphones to take pictures. Volume sales will drop to about 1.35 million units as early as the year starting in April, Chief Executive Officer Hiroyuki Sasa said in an interview in Tokyo on Monday. The company forecasts it will sell 2.7 million compact cameras ...
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BOJ maintains monetary easing policy upgrades economic appraisal
The prospect of a clash over defense policy between South Korea's new president and the U.S. has been diminished by North Korea's own ham-fisted ...
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Kyoto papers seek heritage status
Preserving history: The 'Toji Hyakugomonjo' documents, mainly minutes of discussions about the management of Toji Temple in Kyoto between the eighth to late 19th century, will be recommended for UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. | ...
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Hell hath no fury Pope an exorcist
Pope Francis’ fascination with the devil took on remarkable new twists Tuesday, with a well-known exorcist insisting Francis helped ';liberate'; a Mexican man possessed by four different demons despite the Vatican’s insistence that no such papal exorcism took place. The case concerns a 43-year-old ...
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Sony to mull selling stake in show biz
Sony Corp. said Wednesday that its board of directors will consider a proposal by a U.S. hedge fund to put on the stock market a minority stake in Sony’s entertainment division, retracting an earlier statement that they won’t be put up for sale. Daniel Loeb, the hedge fund billionaire who heads the U.S.-based Third Point LLC — Sony’s major stakeholder — suggested ...
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Nationalism rearing ugly head with greater frequency
Angry protesters took to the streets Sunday in Tokyo’s Shin-Okubo district, home to many Korean shops and restaurants, describing the Korean residents there as ';cockroaches'; and calling for their immediate ';extermination.'; It was only the latest in a series of anti-Korean rallies in the neighborhood that have grown more intense in the past few months. Often ...
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Annual entrance passes eyed for Skytree
The operator of Tokyo Skytree is considering issuing annual observatory entrance passes, Michiaki Suzuki, president of Tobu Tower Skytree Co., said in an interview. ';A new ticket sales strategy is undoubtedly a key part of our business agenda. We are now examining the timing of the launch of the passes,'; Suzuki said. Currently, an on-the-day entry ticket for the 634-meter-tall ...
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Does France have right revival plan
PARIS - The man charged with reviving France’s shrinking economy and attracting businesses to invest there is gaining a reputation for doing the opposite. As the country’s first-ever minister for industrial renewal, Arnaud Montebourg has told the world’s largest steelmaker it is not welcome in France; exchanged angry letters with the head of an American tire company he was ...
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Kagawa can become United star despite frustrating first season
Pope Francis’ fascination with the devil took on remarkable new twists Tuesday, with a well-known exorcist insisting Francis helped ';liberate'; a Mexican man possessed by four different demons despite the Vatican’s insistence that no such papal exorcism took place. The case concerns a 43-year-old ...
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Spurs ride out storm
When Tony Parker started running low on masterful plays, Tim Duncan was there to take over and guide the San Antonio Spurs to a 2-0 lead in the Western Conference finals. Parker had 15 points and a career playoff-high 18 assists, Duncan scored San ...
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Guitarist Dustin Wong brings singer Takako Minekawa out on a ‘Toropical’ journey
Guitarist Dustin Wong hesitates for a split second. It’s a pause that would go unnoticed during most other sets, but Wong has spent the last 40 minutes seemingly in a trance while playing guitar and looping the notes via an array of pedals in ...
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Explore one of Tokyo’s most indie neighborhoods at Shimokitazawa Sound Cruising
Guitarist Dustin Wong hesitates for a split second. It’s a pause that would go unnoticed during most other sets, but Wong has spent the last 40 minutes seemingly in a trance while playing guitar and looping the notes via an array of pedals in ...
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Finding an artistic home for fashion
Spring wear: Tsumura Kosuke's transparent survival jackets, now on display in the design gallery at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. | © FINAL ...
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The humor of candid camera
With the advent of the digital camera, mobile phones and social networking, the world is now drowning in photographic imagery. This raises the question: Can photography survive as an art form in a world where it is ubiquitous? The exhibition of work by Kayo Ume, under the title ';Umekayo,'; at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery offers a partial response to this question, and suggests ...
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Sometimes it’s hard for Leonardo to impress
Guitarist Dustin Wong hesitates for a split second. It’s a pause that would go unnoticed during most other sets, but Wong has spent the last 40 minutes seemingly in a trance while playing guitar and looping the notes via an array of pedals in ...
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Ms. Park’s triumphant U.S. visit
The prospect of a clash over defense policy between South Korea's new president and the U.S. has been diminished by North Korea's own ham-fisted ...
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Watching what the church does
-bashing. Catholics are bashed quite enough by their own pedophile priests. 2. She says my letter ';falsely portrays the Cathars as a … wrongfully persecuted religious minority.'; So, in Kim’s opinion, they were obviously a rightfully persecuted minority. 3. She says ';the Cathars had murdered a papal envoy.'; And that justifies the murder over decades of an ...
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Inventors of human rights
Jennifer Kim, in her letter of May 16, seems to be doing a bit of an Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto special. She appears to be suggesting that the mass murder of heretics [Cathars] was necessary at the time. She seems to take the apparent wrongness of their teaching — which supposedly took the anti-life bias of Christianity a little too far — as justification for a ...
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Perfect material for bullying
It ain’t easy being a bilingual girl ';: I agree that bilingual Japanese face obstacles today as they did 30 years ago. We are constantly subjected to bullying in private as well as in the media. Look at all the television shows that persistently make fun of returnees, portraying them as some unidentified creature. We are considered stuck up because of our opinions, and our good ...
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Hitler cited his religious faith
While there does seem to be some disagreement among historians about the degree of Adolf Hitler’s religious beliefs, I think it’s inaccurate for Jennifer Kim, in her May 16 letter, to claim his Catholicism was abandoned in his youth. Published in 1925 and 1926, ';Mein Kampf'; includes a plethora of religious statements. For example, on page 46, Hitler wrote, ';I ...
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Use of ‘force’ was the difference
Perhaps I am in a rare position to comment, from almost firsthand experience, on the statements [about the inevitability of wartime prostitution] made by Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto and former Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara. In the 1960s I served my country as a fighter pilot and, as such, was often on foreign bases and in the company of pilots and other military personnel from other countries. I ...
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Japan focuses on next big export
Smart grids are the way of the future, according to a Japanese consortium of seven companies that want to invest in the cities of the future and pave the way for the next big export to come out of Japan.
Japan is already one of the leading high-tech industries of the world, producing gadgets and appliances that are sold globally, from cars and microwaves to robots for use in surgery, space and mines. The country is a major manufacturing hub, there are Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba and Nintendo appliances in homes across the globe and many of the world’s most famous export brands have their headquarters in Japan or were founded in Japan. Read more
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