Welcome to Black Tokyo!
When President-elect Barack Obama and his family take up residence in the White House it means that he will move into every household in America. He will not be just some Black dude that moved in down the street in a predominately White neighborhood and his family will not become the [...]

Japanese universities look abroad in hopes of upping their sagging enrollments

Rie Yoshinaga had a wide range of colleges to choose from.

Globalization: Of the 6,000 students at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Kyushu, nearly half come from abroad, as does the faculty. Classes are taught both in English and Japanese. TOMOKO OTAKE PHOTOS

Having studied at a high [...]

How ill is Kim Jong Il?
Intelligence agencies around the world, including the CIA, are believed preparing for possible turmoil in North Korea, where the dictator’s health remains a highly guarded secret from the outside world.

One size fits all: North Korean leader Kim Jong Il visits a military unit at an undisclosed location in this recent [...]

Reporters can be a real pain in the ketsu (oshiri) when they ask questions that have much to do about zip. Ampontan reports that PM Aso firmly handled one reporter recently. Is this the beginning of “change” in the world of Japanese politics? Will PM Aso kick ass and take names or will he fall [...]

According to statistics released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, one out of every seven Japanese children under 17 lives in poverty.
Poverty has long been known to adversely effect children’s health and education, but there also are concerns now that growing up in poverty tends to lock children into a cycle of poverty [...]

Part 16: Safe?! No I am not!
5-minutes before the beginning of the class and I am still unable to find one of the teachers. I had assumed that she was in homeroom, the bathroom or late but i could be mistaken. I decide to wait in the class. I double check my printed schedule and [...]

Part 15: One of the more annoying situations that the foreign English teacher can find himself in is being stuck between a disorganized company and an even less organized school.
I rotate between schools, with the end effect being that I have the schedule for the next school sent to me before I’m scheduled to go [...]