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Why are cats so big on the Internet? A writer goes to Japan, “where the Internet-feline market began,” to find out: “Marx and I watch a few new cat videos, some of the up-and-comers, those challenging or exceeding Maru’s pageviews. ‘An interesting thing, here in Japan, is that it’s not just the cat partners who […]

Japanese-pop star Hatsune Miku has millions of YouTube hits, sells tickets to her concerts at $76 a pop and has adoring fans from all around the world. She’s also not human: “Created by Crypton Future Media, Miku is the most popular avatar created to sell Vocaloid 2, the singing synthesizer application originally developed by Yamaha. […]

Life on the job with a team of nuclear divers. As nuclear power plants age, they require more upkeep—and much of that work can happen underwater: “Last March, a tsunami hit Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, leading to a disastrous series of reactor meltdowns. The consequences were immediate. Germany vowed to phase out nuclear […]

On the Japanese workers—some 18,000 of them—who have ventured into the radioactive exclusion zone following the meltdowns at Fukushima, and the work of radiation expert Dr. Robert Gale: “The worries about the spread of radiation have hardly abated, but the workers remain all but nameless and faceless; they rarely speak to the press—for fear of […]

Murakami has always considered himself an outsider in his own country. He was born into one of the strangest sociopolitical environments in history: Kyoto in 1949 — the former imperial capital of Japan in the middle of America’s postwar occupation. “It would be difficult to find another cross-cultural moment,” the historian John W. Dower has […]

In other countries, people might want to put more distance between themselves and the source of the radiation, but this is difficult on a crowded archipelago with a rigid job market. Thousands have fled nonetheless, but most people in the disaster area will have to stay and adjust. Doing so would be easier if there […]

“It breaks my heart to go out and tell people, ‘Hey, you know that place your grandparents immigrated to, the place you call home, that seaside cottage? Well, it turns out to be a high-risk disaster zone. Yeah. We get a massive earthquake every 300 to 500 years around here, and we’re due. They’re super […]

The lone memento of Luke Hill’s unhappy existence hangs like a specter in his former bedroom, piercing blue eyes haunting from a 12-year-old portrait. It’s Luke at age 4, in a blue silk kimono, a glossy studio snapshot from when the family lived in Japan, during Dad’s service in the U.S. Marine Corps. This is […]

To geologists, earthquakes are a constant in the planet’s eternal becoming. To the Japanese, they are simply a constant. In a given year, there can be hundreds, usually barely discernible micro-events. They rattle the pictures on the wall, the china on the table, but they rarely stop the conversation. Donald Keene, a professor at Columbia […]

Japan’s reactors are “light water” reactors, whose safety depends on an uninterrupted power supply to circulate water quickly around the hot core. A light water system is not the only way to design a nuclear reactor. But because of the way the commercial nuclear power industry developed in its early years, it’s virtually the only […]