May 17, 2013
Earthquake survivors, holding placards made of cardboard, were seen skirmishing with hastily dispatched government officials around noon on April 22, two days after a magnitude-7.0 seismic event rocked the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan.
May 08, 2013
My new assignment bounced me from Tokyo to Hong Kong. Spoken Cantonese is unintelligible to me, but at least I can guess the meaning of Chinese characters.
May 04, 2013
China now has an evangelist of "dreams"--none other than Xi Jinping, who was formally anointed as president in mid-March.
April 27, 2013
Philosopher Shunsuke Tsurumi once wrote: "Having been told of the nation's defeat in World War II during the summer holiday of 1945, the hearts of schoolteachers were heavy as they headed to school on September 1, the first day of the autumn term. They now had to teach their pupils the opposite of what they had been teaching.
April 18, 2013
In a farming village in China's Shanxi province, a place with vast stretches of dry yellow earth, I visited a woman they call "huohuashi," a living fossil.
March 30, 2013
I was watching a frankly dull documentary on YouTube when my vision suddenly blurred. God forbid, my eyes were tearing up!
March 25, 2013
As I dove into the interior of the 10-meter-tall parade float with the giant puppet eagles atop, I could only see a skeleton of steel pipes, the lining of fabric wrapped around its exterior and sheets of plywood.
March 17, 2013
When I looked out the window one morning, light snow was falling. It was Feb. 25. The day before, Feb. 24, was Jan. 15 according to the lunar calendar, the day of the Lantern Festival. That night the firecrackers and fireworks marking the end of the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) enveloped Beijing in thick smoke, although this winter the air would have been suffocating enough without it, due to serious air pollution.
March 07, 2013
Rap, as I assume you all know, is a form of pop music characterized by rhyming lyrics, chanted or spoken rapidly to an instrumental or synthesized beat.
March 02, 2013
News reports of a death sentence for a woman who was routinely subjected to domestic violence before killing her husband is causing an uproar in China.
February 22, 2013
Three former North Korean defectors to the South, back in their home country, criticized South Korean society and their former lives there at a news conference in the People's Palace of Culture in Pyongyang, the state-run Korean Central News Agency said.
February 10, 2013
On the afternoon of Jan. 17, more than 100 reporters and other employees of the Southern Weekly came out of the building in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, which houses the headquarters of the Chinese newspaper.
February 01, 2013
SAO PAULO, Brazil--Three mannequins sporting makeup and long hair stand on display at a clothing shop near Paulista Avenue in the center of the city.
January 20, 2013
I was at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo the other day to see an exhibition of works by contemporary artist Makoto Aida.
January 17, 2013
BEIJING--Chinese students learning Japanese braved the cold and snow, which wrapped the capital for a second time this winter, to attend the awards ceremony for a Japanese-language essay contest on Dec. 14. The students, who came from all parts of China, gathered at a hall adjacent to the official residence of the Japanese ambassador to China.
January 09, 2013
"Times have changed."
January 07, 2013
I recently read a book by Hiroko Kumagai titled "Mukashi Genpatsu Ima Tanko" (Nuclear power generation of the past, coal mining of the present). My immediate reaction to this title was that the past and the present should be the other way around: I mean, nuclear power generation belongs in the present and coal mining belongs in the past. But once you start reading this book, you come to fully appreciate the author's intentional reversal.
December 11, 2012
The day after Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda promised to dissolve the Lower House during a Diet debate with opposition party leaders, China inaugurated its new leadership. Due to time zones, these two news stories hit the pages of America's major newspapers at the same time, but there was a clear difference in how they were treated: China was on every front page, while Japan was relegated to the international section.
November 23, 2012
The disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant forced many residents to abandon their homes, including citizens of the town of Futaba, where the plant's No. 5 and No. 6 reactors are located.
November 22, 2012
Editor's note: This is the final installment of the regular weekly Correspondent's Notebook series. AJW will continue to run selected Correspondent's Notebook columns from The Asahi Shimbun on an irregular basis.