Me and the president Originally uploaded by Durf Martti Ahtisaari is a former Finnish president and the recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He came to Japan to speak on conflict resolution and then toured the tsunami-stricken areas near Sendai. I got to tag along and interview him for around a half-hour in the [...]
Archive for the ‘Japan’ Category
Cabinet numbers
So the voting is now underway for the Democratic Party of Japan’s presidency, and thus the next prime minister of Japan. Tomorrow all the papers will carry their pieces on “the ninety-fifth prime minister.”* Which is odd, really. The number 95 doesn’t refer to the number of prime ministers who have headed up Japan’s government, [...]
AKB48: The media response
There’s an interesting piece in the Japanese Wall Street Journal looking at the recent “election” to determine the most popular member of platoon-sized girl group AKB48. Kanai Keiko, a former Reuters reporter, translator, and editor who now teaches at Kinki University, titles her June 28 piece “Media coverage of the AKB48 ‘general election’ heats up, [...]
Today in sumo history
Fifteen years ago today, two men died at the Fujita Health University Hospital in Aichi Prefecture: Kōtetsuyama Kōnoshin and Hashimoto Seiichirō. I had expected to see their deaths being revisited in the press this year, considering what’s been happening in the sumō world. (Mark Schilling contributed a good piece to the Wall Street Journal in February [...]
The terror of photo credits
When my company publishes things, sometimes we decide we’d like to have an image to go with the words. We find something worth printing or uploading, contact the person with the rights to that image, and ask for permission to publish—along with the person’s preference for attribution in the photo caption (or in tiny text [...]
