Search Results for: Japan

Kei Igawa: The Lost Yankee

Longreads Pick

Plucked from a Japanese baseball all-star team roster in 2007 and introduced at a lavish news conference, Igawa was expected to be a staple in the Yankees’ starting rotation. He lasted 16 games, most of them regrettable outings that were sometimes spectacularly inept. Booed off the field, he was called one of the worst free-agent signings in Yankees history. After his last, losing appearance for the Yankees in early 2008, he was banished to the farm system and he has not come back.

Published: Jul 23, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,520 words)

Immigrant Misappropriations: The Importance of Ichiro

Longreads Pick

The seat was in Area 51, the section of bleachers directly behind the right-field fence that still serves as the unofficial Japanese cheering section. An older Japanese couple sat to my right. Both wore blindingly white Ichiro jerseys and flat-billed Mariners caps. They nodded, using the jerky, polite motion that many older Japanese use when greeting young Americans, and the husband offered me a bite of his plate of garlic fries. When I said, “No, thank you,” his wife smiled, revealing a gold canine tooth that reminded me, strangely enough, of a photo of my great-grandmother taken when she lived on an orchard in what is now North Korea, a few years before the Japanese occupation during World War II that forced her to flee to the South.

Source: Grantland
Published: Jun 14, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,125 words)

Becoming Katie (Part One)

Longreads Pick

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 Katie’s room now, and the picture of Luke hanging on her wall is the only one she’ll allow her mother to display in the house.

Source: Tulsa World
Published: May 7, 2011
Length: 7 minutes (1,876 words)

Aftershocks: A Nation Bears the Unbearable

Longreads Pick

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 and the dean of Japanese-literature scholars, said, “Very often, when I have been away from Japan for a while and come back, there will be a small earthquake, and I notice it and no one else in the room does. They laugh at me.” He added, “People expect this all the time, that they will be warned. But when a quake of great magnitude happens they are shocked. The world changes.”

Author: Evan Osnos
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Mar 21, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,702 words)

Out of Options: A Surprising Culprit in the Nuclear Crisis

Longreads Pick

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 type of reactor used in nuclear power plants today. Even though there might be better technologies out there, light water is the one that utility companies know how to build, and that governments have historically been willing to fund. Economists call this problem “technological lock-in”: The term refers to the process by which one new technology can prevail over another for no good reason other than circumstance and inertia.

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Mar 20, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,369 words)

Seeing God in Tsunamis and Everyday Events

Seeing God in Tsunamis and Everyday Events

Seeing God in Tsunamis and Everyday Events

Longreads Pick

It’s only a matter of time—in fact, they’ve already started cropping up—before reality-challenged individuals begin pontificating about what God could have possibly been so hot-and-bothered about to trigger last week’s devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan. (Surely, if we were to ask Westboro Baptist Church members, it must have something to do with the gays.) But from a psychological perspective, what type of mind does it take to see unexpected natural events such as the horrifying scenes still unfolding in Japan as “signs” or “omens” related to human behaviors?

Published: Mar 13, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,157 words)

From 1948: Pearl Harbor in Retrospect

From 1948: Pearl Harbor in Retrospect

Pearl Harbor in Retrospect

Longreads Pick

From 1948: Maj. Gen. Sherman Miles, Assistant Chief of Staff for Military Intelligence at the time of the attack, reflects on what went wrong. “The last twenty-four hours in Washington before the bombs fell have come in for much scrutiny. Why did the President, with most of the Japanese final answer before him, conclude that it meant war and then, after a fitful attempt to reach Admiral Stark by telephone, quietly go to bed? Why was he in seclusion the following morning? Why was no action taken on the Japanese reply by the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy when they met on that Sunday morning? Why did they not consult the President, or he send for them? Where was everybody, including my humble self? Why, in short, didn’t someone stage a last-minute rescue, in good Western style?”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jul 1, 1948
Length: 28 minutes (7,118 words)

Can China Discover the Urge to Splurge?

Longreads Pick

For the rest of the world, the Chinese consumer is one of the best hopes for future economic growth. In the years ahead, when the United States, Europe and Japan will have no choice but to slow their spending and pay off their debts, China could pick up the slack. Millions of Americans — yes, millions — could end up with jobs that exist, at least in part, to design, make or sell goods and services to China.

Published: Nov 24, 2010
Length: 32 minutes (8,029 words)