Until June 2002 Magic Mushrooms were legal in JapanJapan, despite its lax attitude toward tobacco and alcohol, has always been very strict when it comes to matters of “more illicit” drugs. Laws regulating soft drugs such as marijuana are as strict as those toward heroin and cocaine. This was not so until the American Constitution [...]

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This is a follow up story to our earlier coverage of the Yakuza turf wars in Nishiazabu, Central Tokyo (we advise to read the first article for context before going on).

Next Wednesday will mark 49 days since Ryoichi Sugiura (杉浦良一), a director of the Sumiyoshi-kai (住吉会), a Tokyo Yakuza gang, was shot and killed around [...]

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This is stippy’s fifth part in a series (see also parts 1, 2, 3 and 4) about one foreigner’s experience of being put in a Japanese prison (留置場 or “ryuchijyo”, a prison for locking up people for as long as 23 days until they are convicted, or cleared of a crime).

Below is the continuation of [...]

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Rinko Kikuchi as a JyoshiKosei in the Movie “Babel”いあい (iai)
* “J-WOTD” = “Japanese Word of the Day”
If you enjoyed the movie Babel / バベルの塔 (official English language site) as much as I did then I’m sure the first thing you did when you got home was to do a Google Search to find out who [...]

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Baidu.com. Heard of it? Possibly not, but Baidu is a $3 billion market capped internet beast in China with, according to Yahoo! Finance, over $125 million in cash. If you are of Chinese decent and live in Asia, chances are you know them very well.

Baidu listed on NASDAQ in 2005 and everyone who bought in [...]

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Changing jobs is always an emotional experience for the best of us, but what do you think was going through Yasuyuki Higuchi’s (樋口泰行) mind when he accepted the job of Microsoft Japan COO last week, switching Jobs in more ways than one.

While he was notably cagey at the press conference, it feels as though existing [...]

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