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Nov 2, 2024 | 
japantimes.co.jp | Alex Martin
Just a 20-minute walk from Hanno Station in Saitama Prefecture is Mount Tenran, a 197-meter peak that looks more like a big hill than a mountain. Nevertheless, it’s a popular destination for day hikes and holds a special place in the community, with a local sake brewery paying tribute to the summit by naming its signature tipple after it. Mount Tenran is also part of the approximately 1,000 monitoring sites across Japan where fixed-point observations of the status of flora and fauna are conducted.
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Oct 20, 2024 | 
japantimes.co.jp | Alex Martin
On a desert tableland roughly 400 kilometers from the Peruvian capital of Lima is the Nazca Pampa, home to ancient geoglyphs that survived for millennia before being rediscovered in the early 20th century. Masato Sakai has been exploring this vast, arid landscape, which is 500 meters above sea level, for three decades in order to find and understand how and why these enigmatic designs, known as the Nazca Lines, came to be.
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Oct 11, 2024 | 
japantimes.co.jp | Alex Martin
A famous proverb says time is money. So too is sleep, it seems. A study published in Rand Health Quarterly in 2017 examined the economic burden of insufficient sleep across five OECD countries: Canada, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
japantimes.co.jp | Alex Martin |Chris Russell |Zoria Petkoska
I have never seen a nightclub fall silent. All eyes are on a solitary female figure in white body paint, writhing under a spotlight. She’s almost unearthly, a ghostly pupa. For many of those gathered in this cyberpunk-esque space, this is their first brush with butoh, an avant-garde form of dance that blends slow, deliberate movements with surreal and often grotesque imagery to explore themes of death, suffering and transformation.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
japantimes.co.jp | Alex Martin |Chris Russell
Last Friday, members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party chose its next leader and, by extension, the next prime ministe — and for the first time in ages, the house didn’t win. In other words, the winning candidate was not the choice of a handful of party elites who gamed the system. Instead, a narrow victory went to Shigeru Ishiba, a politician who has long faced headwinds inside the party and who now promises to bring a new brand of leadership to the country.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
japantimes.co.jp | Alex Martin |Chris Russell |Gearoid Reidy
Japan’s ruling party made its choice — and it was a stunning upset. In an unusually hotly contested election, the Liberal Democratic Party, which has held power almost uninterrupted since World War II, was faced with the most varied slate of visions for its future ever seen. The field of nine candidates represented nearly every strand of politics the broad party holds. In the end, it chose Shigeru Ishiba. Now it must contend with what that means.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
japantimes.co.jp | Alex Martin |Tomoko Otake |Chris Russell
Images and illustrations — from Leonardo Da Vinci’s sketches to drawings in 18th- and 19th-century honzō gaku monographs — have long had an important scientific role. But the burgeoning “SciArt” movement is trying to move researchers’ gaze from the lab to the gallery and beyond in a bid to not just increase public engagement, but to shape research itself.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
japantimes.co.jp | Alex Martin |Tomoko Otake |Eric Johnston
As newly elected Liberal Democratic Party President Shigeru Ishiba gets set to be named prime minister Tuesday during an extraordinary session of parliament, a snap general election at the end of next month appears increasingly likely. Over the weekend, Ishiba, who won the party presidency Friday, began putting together the LDP’s senior leadership team, and indicated he may dissolve the Lower House and hold an election soon in the hope of winning a mandate for the party and his leadership.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
japantimes.co.jp | Alex Martin |Tomoko Otake
Incoming prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, said on Sunday the country's monetary policy must remain accommodative as a trend, signaling the need to keep borrowing costs low to underpin a fragile economic recovery. It was not immediately clear whether Ishiba, who had been a vocal critic of the Bank of Japan's past aggressive monetary easing, was taking a more dovish line with his remarks.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
japantimes.co.jp | Alex Martin |Tomoko Otake
The Yomiuri Giants triumphed in a fierce, season-long battle to reclaim the Central League pennant on Saturday with a resounding 8-1 win over the Hiroshima Carp. This is the team's first league championship in four years and comes in a year in which the Giants are celebrating their 90th anniversary.
