Tokyo Comedy Bar Opens In Shibuya
After the past couple of years, we could all do with more laughs. Yet when Ben “BJ” Fox proposed opening a comedy venue in the middle of a pandemic, many…
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Japan: The Shape Of Things To Come? Find out this Sunday (May 15)
This coming Sunday (May 15, starting 10am), sees a unique event at the Yokohama campus of Meiji Gakuin University and online via Zoom, called THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME, marking the…
Response to The Hollywood Reporter Article
Any competent journalist here knows that the civil servant laws here (公務員法) and the State Secrets Law make it a crime for government officials to divulge confidential information to third…
Protecting Sources & Risking Lives: The Ethical Dilemmas of Japanese Journalism
"1. Write the truth by any means possible. 2. Protect your sources. 3. If you can't write the story, without protecting your sources, find new or different sources or drop…
A Farewell To Japan’s King of Toxic Masculinity: Shintaro Ishihara
Ishihara hated outspoken women and liberal men; he had no kind feelings for the US and refused to be enthralled or intimidated by western culture. Ishihara reserved his most acidic…
Live from the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Closing Ceremony
By Chihiro Kai (This article was completed 22:06) As I sit here in the Tokyo Olympic Stadium press section, the seats are vibrating from the music and bass blasting out…
My Brushes With the Yakuza – Reflections of Life in Akasaka, Tokyo
My first encounter with the ‘yakuza’ or the crooks and gangsters of Japan’s underworld, happened when I was 14 years old, on my way home from cram school. It was…
Lambda Is On The Lam In Japan
The Tokyo 2020 Olympics are over but they may leave a lasting legacy in Japan: the deadly COVID19 Lambda variant; it first arrived on July 20th, when a woman in…
In the shadows of Hiroshima: Director Kurosaki takes on the story of Japan’s own WWII top-secret nuclear arms plan
And now a Japanese movie is saying we could have been the perpetrators of the world's first nuclear bomb attack? That's an incredibly heavy load to process, and still more…
Japan Reported The First Finding Of The Highly Infectious LAMBDA Variant Here, Three Days Before The Olympics Began
The National Institute of Infectious Diseases (Tokyo) reported the first finding of the highly infectious Lambda variant of COVID19 here to an international database three days before the Olympics Opening…