Masaki Watanabe

What kind of a country is Ireland? Generations of people migrating to North America, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere since the Potato Famine of the 19th century have earned a place for themselves in societies across the English-speaking world ,…

Travis Takashi Ishikawa of the San Francisco Giants recently made a lot of Japanese North Americans feel proud when he said: “I never give up because my grandfather was interned during the war.” This after he belted a walk-off home…

One of the things I appreciate about life in Canada is that we still have bookstores just about everywhere, from small neighborhood retailers to chain book stores in shopping malls and elsewhere that offer hard-cover and paperbacks of novels and…

In my daily perusal of the Japanese print media via news websites and a weekly magazine or two, I sometimes come across fascinating juxtapositions that would be rarely seen in Western popular press. One recent example is a personal advice…

This is the second half of my exercise in optimism as in the lyrics of What a Wonderful World, the evergreen hit made popular by Louis Armstrong and others, on all the nice things I’ve experienced, seen and heard about…

I see trees of green, red roses too I see them bloom for me and you And I think to myself what a wonderful world. Back in 1967, the tune What a Wonderful World, sung by the inimitable Louis Armstrong,…

 In this strife-torn world, racism rears its ugly head all too often – especially over age-old disputes, whether between whites and blacks in the US and elsewhere, between some Arabs and Jews or, of late, between, some Chinese, Koreans and…

We in the relatively mild climate of Lower Mainland have been pretty lucky as far as extreme weather conditions are concerned –  like the past winter’s record cold spells that froze the East Coast and the Great Lakes area, or…

 He used to write in essays as a schoolboy “I want to become a police officer or a member of the Self-Defence Forces (SFD) to protect my family” …Now an SDF reservist, he undergoes a regular programme of basic training,…