He brought Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Cabbage Patch Kids to our living rooms. He made and lost fortunes. Can Al Kahn stay in the game?

Shut out of the employment market in their 20s, hikkomori shut-ins continue to search for direction in middle age.

Cultures clash when a man bonds with his boyfriend's mother.

A profile of Marlon Brando, 33, holed up in a hotel suite in Kyoto where he was filming Sayonara.

After Fukushima, balancing the risk of another disaster against the rising danger of climate change.

The fading beauty of Japan’s traditional cafes and their signature snack.

People who are short on relatives can hire a husband, a mother, a grandson. The resulting relationships can be more real than you’d expect.

He never saw it coming.

When Japanese men in their teens and twenties shut themselves in their rooms, sometimes for a period of years, one way to lure them out is a hired “big sister.”

Sada Abe, a former geisha, became a sensation in 1930s Japan after erotically asphyxiating her married lover, cutting off his penis and testicles and carrying them in her kimono for days.

On the long wait and the magical payoff.

A nation of suit-wearing salarymen educates its first generation of stay-at-home dads.

Aum Shinrikyo was founded in 1984 as a yoga and meditation class, initially known as Oumu Shinsen no Kai (オウム神仙の会 "Aum Mountain Hermits’ Society"), by pharmacist Chizuo Matsumoto.

Later, Matsumoto changed his name to Shoko Asahara and masterminded the most deadly terrorist attack in Japanese history. Asahara was executed by hanging on July 6, 2018, at the Tokyo Detention House, 23 years after the sarin gas attack, along with six other cult members.

How the 130-year-old game company bounced back with the Switch.

Mark Karpelès ran the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world until a heist made it insolvent, ultimately landing him in solitary confinement in Japanese prison.

In 2001, a young Japanese woman walked into the North Dakota woods and froze to death. Had she come in search of the $1 million dollars buried nearby in the film Fargo?

In postwar Japan, a single-minded focus on rapid economic growth helped erode family ties. Now, a generation of elderly Japanese are dying alone.

I played a father for a 12-year-old with a single mother. The girl was bullied because she didn’t have a dad, so the mother rented me. I’ve acted as the girl’s father ever since. I am the only real father that she knows.

Survivors of the 2011 Japanese tsunami in a small town on the north-east coast are haunted by a split second decision at a local school.

The lives of six people who survived the atomic bomb.

Tokyo’s reverent “black music” fandom.

The 2011 Tohoku Japan earthquake and tsunami, as experienced by eight schoolchildren.

Five years after the tsunami that killed tens of thousands in Japan, a husband still searches the sea for his wife, joined by a father hoping to find his daughter.

“There’s no blueprint for remediating a radioactive town and then moving people back into it.”

An American reporter takes on the Yakuza.