The Philippines were ready. For days before the war began, the guns had been manned and the planes had stood alert. The Philippines were still ready. After a week of heavy bombing, of fierce scraps on Luzon beachheads, of dogfights among black bursts of ack-ack, of desperate aerial assaults to hold Japanese ships off the coast, the Philippines stood fast. For all his losses the Jap had little to show this week. He had done a decently good job of ...

This is the typical day of a relatively typical soul in today's diversified world. I wake up to the sound of my Japanese clock radio, put on a T shirt sent me by an uncle in Nigeria and walk out into the street, past German cars, to my office. Around me are English-language students from Korea, Switzerland and Argentina -- all on this Spanish-named road in this Mediterranean-style town. On TV, I find, the news is in Mandarin; today's baseball ...

Investors keen to protect their precious cash have sought security in all the usual places in recent months. The U.S. dollar, the Swiss franc and the Japanese yen — each with a history as a safe haven — have all provided homes for nervous depositors' cash. But as the economies of those three countries flounder, it's time to look around, and smart investors think they've discovered a new harbor to protect them from the choppy economic seas. ...

Eguchi Aimi is your typical Japanese pop star: perfect skin, high-pitched girlish voice, lithe figure, and a team of computer designers, photographers, and other pop stars artificially constructing her every movement. You read that correctly. Aimi does not exist — at least not in the traditional sense. But this drawback has not stopped the girl, who was announced as the newest member of all-girl supergroup AKB 48 earlier this month, has already graced the cover of Japan's Weekly ...

The fallout from Fukushima continues. Concerns about an effort by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to revive his country's nuclear power program helped drive millions of Italians to the polls June 13, when they voted overwhelmingly to block any such revival amid safety concerns following the meltdown in March of the Japanese plant. Berlusconi's name didn't appear on the ballots, which also offered voters the opportunity to overturn laws governing the privatization of water and a ...

By the time President Obama sat down with House Republicans on June 1 to talk about the exploding public debt, the economic data had been grim for days: another decline in home values, a new dip in consumer confidence and, just that morning, the lowest manufacturing-sector growth rate in more than a year and a dismal payroll report showing job growth far below expectations. In another era, these sorts of numbers would have led to a predictable ...

It's a ritual that boils the blood of whale-watchers everywhere. On Nov. 18, a fleet of four Japanese vessels left Shimonoseki harbor in Western Japan to begin its five-month whale hunt in the Antarctic Ocean. This time, however, the whalers are planning what's expected to be its largest hunt in decades; along with about 850 minke and 50 finback whales, the fleet says it plans to harpoon as many as 50 humpback whales for the first time ...

VESSELS MOORED IN HARBOR: NINE BATTLESHIPS; THREE CLASS-B CRUISERS; THREE SEAPLANE TENDERS; SEVENTEEN DESTROYERS. ENTERING HARBOR ARE FOUR CLASS-B CRUISERS; THREE DESTROYERS. ALL AIRCRAFT CARRIERS AND HEAVY CRUISERS HAVE DEPARTED HARBOR. No INDICATION OF ANY CHANGES IN U.S. FLEET. "ENTERPRISE" AND "LEXINGTON" HAVE SAILED FROM PEARL HARBOR. In his office at the Japanese consulate in Honolulu on the night of Dec. 6, 1941, Vice Consul Morimura, 27, glanced at this message, buzzed for his code clerk, ordered the report sent ...

Excerpts from the report of the Commission headed by Associate Justice Roberts which investigated and fixed the blame for the disaster at Pearl Harbor: >In a letter of January 24, 1941, the Secretary of the Navy advised the Secretary of War that the increased gravity of the Japanese situation had prompted a restudy of the problem of the security of the Pacific Fleet while in Pearl Harbor. The writer stated: "If war eventuates with Japan, it is believed easily possible ...

Just before daybreak on a rainy summer morning last July, three large trucks pulled up to the gates of an outdoor sculpture museum south of Seoul with some unusual passengers. The trucks were carrying 70 wooden crates: inside, carefully wrapped in felt, lay the statues of 65 Korean scholars, one warrior and four children. Elegant, stylized figures chiseled from blocks of gray granite hundreds of years ago, they once stood guard over the tombs of Korea's royal families. But the ...