author

 
Menu
Search
 
November 22, 2024
 

Today's print edition

Home Delivery
Subscribe for more access
Mark Schreiber

Meta

Mark Schreiber
Mark Schreiber worked as a salaryman in travel, consumer electronics, computer software, advertising and market research before turning to translation and writing full time. A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he has lived in Tokyo since 1966.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jun 27, 2010
What's in a name? Politics as usual
When the Democratic Party of Japan indicated in its political manifesto that it favored voting rights for foreign permanent residents, the reaction from some quarters of the media was visceral. In early April, publisher Takarajima-sha produced a 96-page "emergency publication" titled "Gaikokujin Sanseiken...
CULTURE / Books
Jun 27, 2010
Must Hello Kitty really die?
"I love Cantonese," proclaims Fiona Yu. "I can express myself at a whole new level of crudeness and vulgarity that I can't with English."
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Jun 23, 2010
A veteran plumbs his path to Japanese fluency
On a trans-Pacific flight to Narita several months ago, I struck up a conversation with a passenger who was upbeat about living in Japan. After six months, he told me with a self-satisfied grin, he had "just about got all the hiragana down pat."
JAPAN / Media
Jun 6, 2010
The timing behind yakuza crackdown
The media has been filled with revelations of ties between professional sumo and organized crime. Since late May, the tabloids and gossipy "wide shows" on TV have made a huge flap over Sehei Kimura and one other stable master for allowing senior gang members to obtain box-seat tickets to the Nagoya Grand...
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
May 26, 2010
Dealing with sincere and sesame forms of flattery
It's been many years since I've heard anyone remark to me,「日本語がお上手ですね」("Nihongo ga ojōzu desu ne," "Your Japanese is good").
CULTURE / Books
May 23, 2010
Murder, mayhem and brain eaters abound in two Thai thrillers
Thailand, as I write this, is stepping back from major civil unrest. And Canadian author Christopher G. Moore has been blogging frontline dispatches from his home in central Bangkok.
CULTURE / Books
Apr 18, 2010
Hard men have the most reason to weep
Ever since I saw the 1967 film "In the Heat of the Night," in which black homicide detective Virgil Tibbs (played by Sidney Poitier) brought a redneck killer to justice in Sparta, Mississippi, I confess to having been totally hooked on the "ethnic detective" genre. It's a popular formula because it allows...
CULTURE / Books
Mar 28, 2010
Writer's idle hands drawn to dirty work
In Paul Theroux's 1977 short story "Diplomatic Relations," an American diplomat in Malaysia receives a letter from a female colleague, his former lover, warning of her impending visit. Their reunion in a Singapore hotel is brief and awkward, and the diplomat's sentiments, summed up in the final line...
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Mar 24, 2010
Get the sukūpu on crime terms in Japanese
Sometimes I'm asked how I came to be interested in crime in Japan. I guess it began in my early days here as a student and lowly paid salaryman in the late 1960s.
CULTURE / Books
Feb 28, 2010
Seoul brothers take to the streets
Can the term "historical mystery" be applied to works set in the early 1970s? Perhaps not. But Martin Limon's series, now up to six volumes, reliably and compellingly captures the lives and times of George Sueno and Ernie Bascomb, sergeants assigned to the Criminal Investigation Division of the U.S....
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Feb 24, 2010
Confucius says reading on will help your Japanese
I remember the first kanji I ever wrote. In fact, I still have them — a Chinese aphorism roughly equivalent to "seeing is believing." In 1964, I awkwardly copied them out of a book on linguistics from my high school library in North Carolina. I was about to turn 17 and could not possibly have imagined...
CULTURE / Books
Jan 31, 2010
Bright lights, big city, book-loving ninja
In 2008, prolific novelist Andrew Vachss (it rhymes with "tax") brought down the curtain on his series of 18 novels featuring the protagonist Burke, "an ex-con turned avenging angel for hire." Vachss' newest work, "Haiku," lacks the urban mercenary's charismatic presence, but it does return to familiar...
CULTURE / Books
Jan 10, 2010
Ink-stained wretch meets psychic teen freak
It was, as one might expect for a psycho-thriller, a dark and stormy night. Taking a hint from Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), Miyuki Miyabe wades into her narrative with, "I couldn't see more than a yard in front of me, even with my headlights on. The rain poured down and the road was full of puddles...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Jan 3, 2010
Jake Adelstein: Insider reaching out
Author Joshua "Jake" Adelstein supposes that if he'd stayed home in rural Missouri and had never come to Japan, he'd probably have become a small-town lawyer or a very happy detective on the local police force.
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Dec 30, 2009
Need to know those buzzwords to follow Japan's big hit products
Of all the jobs I've held in Japan, by far the most challenging was the four years I spent during the baburu keizai (バブル経済, bubble economy) as a trend watcher for a market-research company.
CULTURE / Books
Dec 6, 2009
There's something dark in the basement
HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET, by Jamie Ford. Ballantine, 2009, 320 pp., $24 (hardcover) Reviewed by Mark Schreiber "Bitter and Sweet" is not just the intersection of two streets in Seattle, but a fair description of the story behind the title. It is 1986, and Henry Lee, a retired draftsman...
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Nov 18, 2009
Let's kensaku — searching the Web in Japanese
Has this ever happened to you? A friend in another country e-mails a plea for help in finding information in Japanese due to their encountering any one of several obstacles. For instance, the operating system or software on the computer they are using might not be able to input Japanese or read it. Or...
CULTURE / Books
Nov 15, 2009
Crime worlds collide in Kowloon
NINE DRAGONS, by Michael Connelly. Little, Brown and Company, 2009, 384 pp., $27.99 (hardcover) Michael Connelly's series character, LAPD homicide detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch, had a rough time as a youth. His mother, a Hollywood party girl, was murdered and he was raised in foster homes until...
CULTURE / Books
Oct 18, 2009
Classic tales of newsprint noir
While a senior at Tokyo's Sophia University, 23-year-old Missouri native Jake Adelstein was heading home from a Shinjuku cinema when, on a whim, he dropped into a game arcade and popped u00a5100 into the slot of a fortunetelling robot for some mystical career advice.
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Sep 30, 2009
Learn the coded language all Japanese know
Encoding and decoding may be almost as old as writing itself.
Two of America’s biggest debt holders are dumping Treasurys
The U.S. Treasury building in Washington. Investors in Japan and China sold a pile of U.S. debt in the last quarter, just before the U.S. presidential election.
Tokyo Metro’s overseas efforts begin in earnest with London deal
Tokyo Metro will soon have a role in the running of London's Elizabeth Line, a major train route serving the U.K.’s capital city and environs.
Russia fired experimental ballistic missile at Ukraine, Putin says
Ukrainian firefighters work on a spot following an airstrike in Dnipro on Thursday.
Ex-yokozuna Kitanofuji dies at 82
Yokozuna Kitanofuji enters the ring during the May 1970 grand sumo tournament in Tokyo.
Man charged with murder allegedly made victim date other men for money
A car carrying suspect Ryotaro Masuda, who was indicted for allegedly beating his 25-year-old girlfriend to death, leaves the Shibuya Police Station in Tokyo on Thursday.
Shohei Ohtani wins National League MVP award
Shohei Ohtani celebrates after hitting a three-run home run against the Padres during the National League Division Series at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles last month.
The slow-burn success of ‘A Samurai in Time’
A 19th-century warrior gets struck by lightning and wakes to find himself in 21st-century Kyoto in Junichi Yasuda’s surprise hit “A Samurai in Time.”
Around a quarter of Japan married couples in their 20s met through dating apps
A survey released by an organization promoting “Good Couples Day” shows that 24% of couples in their 20s met their marriage partner through a dating app.
'Tokyo Swindlers': Get deep into the minds of real estate con artists
In Ko Shinjo's "Tokyo Swindlers," a group of con artists manipulates real estate giants into falsified deals within the highly competitive, quick market.
Japan, U.K. and Italy discuss inviting more countries to joint fighter project
A new concept model of a next-generation fighter jet to be jointly developed by Japan, Britain and Italy is on display in Farnborough, Hampshire, in July.

Podcast

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.
Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Longform

Construction takes place on the Takanawa Gateway Convention Center in Tokyo, slated to open in 2025.
A boom for business tourism in Japan?
By Kathryn Wortley

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

mission sustainability vol.12 : Kose Corp.Kose takes pride in creating beauty in the world
mission sustainability vol.12 : Kose Corp.Kose takes pride in creating beauty in the world

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTS note

Read more

SUPPLEMENTS BINDER