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Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE FOREIGN ELEMENT
Dec 1, 2014

What to buy, where to go: 40 steps to maximum merriment this Christmas in Japan

From meeting Pikachu in Fukushima to a laughter ritual in Osaka, here are dozens of ways to make sure you make the most of the festive season.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Apr 17, 2023

Dark skies, bright future: Japan looks to the heavens for tourism appeal

With a number of dark sky locations offering unparalleled stargazing opportunities, communities are hoping to capitalize on the draw of the cosmos.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Jul 5, 2019

Quiet luxury in lesser-known Kansai

The Kansai area — think Kyoto, Osaka and surrounds — has some of the country's best anaba (little-known spots) where you can encounter the rich depths of Japanese culture, minus the crowds. Reserve one of these nine luxuriously uncrowded options to take your travels to new levels.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Oct 3, 2015

Listening to the wind on Battleship Island

As if from a dream, the island floated over the sea like a terra-cotta dreadnought from a century ago. I'd arrived at Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island, and its profile was unmistakable from the deck of my ferry battling high waves and winds.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
May 18, 2014

Stone, sweat and stamps: chasing Jizos in Kamakura

Amy Chavez gets to know Jizo Bosatsu — the Buddhist deity who looks after travelers and children — a little better, by embarking on a 24-site Jizo Pilgrimage jog through Kamakura.
Japan Times
BUSINESS / FOCUS
Aug 6, 2013

Grahams shepherded Post through tumultuous eight decades

It began with a bankruptcy sale in 1933, when a Republican businessman and presidential confidant reinvented himself as a newspaper publisher in the nation's capital. It ended with an announcement that his descendants had sold the newspaper to an Internet wizard who lives in the Washington on the other...
CULTURE / Stage
Nov 19, 2010

Joan of Arc takes center stage

Though widely known in the West, St. Joan of Arc is an obscure historical figure for many people in Japan. Maki Horikita, who portrays the 15th-century French war heroine in the upcoming TBS stage production "Jeanne d'Arc," rises to the challenge of making Joan's tragic life story relevant for a Japanese...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Jul 11, 2008

The rapid way to escape stress

Ahhhh! — that's the sound an overheated urbanite makes after cooling off in midsummer at Japan's finest whitewater rafting location, Tokushima Prefecture's Yoshino River. Its two gorges, the Oboke and Koboke, draw day-tripping beginners as well as more experienced enthusiasts, with their long stretches...
Japan Times
LIFE
Apr 1, 2007

Drawing on experience

Cartoonists in Japan are as abundant as the cherry blossoms at this time of year -- but Rieko Saibara is probably the only one who has both a lyrical and rebellious side to her work -- along with an astonishing power and what has been called a "lethal poison.''
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Apr 13, 2003

Making a stanza for life

HOW TO HAIKU: A Writer's Guide to Haiku and Related Forms, by Bruce Ross. Tuttle Publishing, 2002, 167 pp., 1800 yen (paper); TAKE A DEEP BREATH: The Haiku Way to Inner Peace, by Sylvia Forges-Ryan & Edward Ryan. Kodansha International, 2002, 129 pp., 1,800 yen (cloth); THE NICK OF TIME: Essays on Haiku...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / Longform
Nov 15, 2021

Ticket to ride: Shizuoka Prefecture shifts gear on turning Izu Peninsula into Japan’s cycling mecca

Despite its relatively small land mass, the peninsula is replete with a plethora of natural, cultural and historical attractions
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / A Weekend In
May 11, 2019

A weekend in Kobe: Beyond the beef, beyond the quake

Kobe — the cosmopolitan capital of Hyogo Prefecture with a population of 1.5 million — has a rich history as one of Japan's most important ports for foreign trade, and international influences are evident in everything from its architecture and design to its food and fashion.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Mar 11, 2017

Unlocking Tokyo's history one step at a time with guided walking tours

Tokyo has never had a reputation for being walkable.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Feb 18, 2017

Wasteland: Tokyo grows on its own trash

Waste management authorities are working constantly to ensure that garbage in the metropolis is put to better use.
Japan Times
BUSINESS / FOCUS
Jul 22, 2013

Restructuring wizard sets sights on Detroit

The man who has become the face of Detroit's historic bankruptcy planned to spend his weekend at home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, corralling the ferns that are overgrowing their planters and threatening his garden. Or maybe taking his two young children to the pool.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Apr 25, 2008

It's hands-on in Kyoto

The standard visit to Kyoto is a test of endurance: you stay until you are sick of temples. This comes as a shock to first-time visitors, for while the city is rich in beautiful tourist spots, a true understanding of the nation's cultural heartland remains as elusive as a maiko (apprentice geisha) scurrying...
Features
Apr 24, 2005

Wannabe style capital puts on a 'cute' show

"Fancy a trip to the Singapore Fashion Festival?" My gnarled editor swiveled around from the Mac and shot me a grin. "This looks like a junket."
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / Japan
Mar 20, 2019

How media discourages Japan's youth from traveling abroad

The nation's best-selling travel guide tends to heavily stress crime and danger in other countries.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink
Nov 3, 2018

A Michelin star in just six months for Ireland's first kaiseki restaurant

Chef Takashi Miyazaki's Ichigo Ichie is Ireland's first kaiseki restaurant — albeit one that blends Japanese and Irish flavors. When it landed a Michelin star within its first year, the restaurant put Cork back on Europe's culinary map and brought Miyazaki instant international acclaim.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Dec 22, 2017

Reenact history at Yakage's fabled daimyo festival

A small town in Okayama Prefecture is seeking to reestablish its relevance.
Japan Times
CULTURE / TV & Streaming
Jul 5, 2017

Japanese TV is making some progress in writing broader female roles

One of the best things to come out of the rise of streaming websites overseas has been an increase in productions that have featured great roles for women. This year alone we've seen some phenomenal acting from Elisabeth Moss on "The Handmaid's Tale" and powerful ensembles on Netflix's "Orange is the...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
May 7, 2016

Conjuring haiku on the trail from Hiroshima to Matsuyama

Riding the shinkansen from Tokyo to Hiroshima, I am glued to my iPhone when Stephen Gill tells me to look outside the window. The countryside — rolling hills and rice paddies — is shrouded in mist. Perhaps inspired by the scene, he begins reciting an English translation of a 17th-century haiku by...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Dec 5, 2015

Oku-Nikko: Once home from home for Japan's diplomats

‘One of the principal points to which travelers will direct their steps is the Lake of Chuzenji,” writes Ernest Mason Satow (1843-1929) in “A Guide Book To Nikko,” the first English tourist guide of the area published in 1875. Satow, a British diplomat and Japanologist, arrived in Japan in 1862...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 4, 2013

Shuji Terayama's underground public stage

Thirty years on from the death of Shuji Terayama, Japanese theater's most avant-garde provocateur continues his renaissance with a show of his films, photography and, most importantly, theater works at the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, which follows on from the recent showing of printed ephemera...
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Sep 16, 2012

Living the botanical high life

Japan, though it has a very different image, is on the same latitude as southern Europe and North Africa, while my nearest city, Sapporo, is oddly enough on the same east-west parallel as France's boisterously cosmopolitan second city of Marseille on the Mediterranean.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jun 25, 2011

'Reluctant' musician blows success his way with horn

Over half his lifetime ago, reluctant horn player Jonathan Hammill, at 15, slumped in the back seat of the family car. Sweaty and bored on a family trip to his grandparents' house in Florida, Hammill watched as his mother impulsively popped in a tape his music teacher had given him as encouragement at...
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Feb 21, 2010

Singing the praises of sparrows

In a rush of small wings, a fluttering, chirruping, congregation of familiar birds — Eurasian tree sparrows — descended on the bush in front of me. They chattered noisily among themselves, each shifting its position almost constantly as if unsure whether it had the right to be on any given perch....
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 5, 2005

More travel information

Vladivostok is most easily accessible by plane from Niigata, which is served two or three times weekly by Air Vladivostok. Flights also depart twice a week from Toyama and Kansai International.
Japan Times
Features / WEEK 3
Apr 17, 2005

'Man Friday' recalls time in line at Japan's first record expo

With the 2005 World Expo Aichi in full swing until September in Nagoya, it may come as a surprise to some that Japan's first world exposition was to have taken place as long ago as in 1912. But that was cancelled due to the death of Emperor Meiji. Another one, to have run in conjunction with Tokyo's...

Longform

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