Japan

Kang Il-chul rides in the back of a van packed with gossiping old women. The 82-year-old girlishly covers her mouth to whisper a secret. "We argue a lot about the food," she says, wrinkling her nose. "To tell you the truth, some of these old ladies are grouchy." There are eight of them, sharing a hillside home on the outskirts of Seoul, sparring over everything from territory to room temperature. Some wear makeup and stylish hats; others are happy in robes and slippers.

Junichi Sato's face clenched when he recalled opening the reeking box of whale meat -- all 50 pounds of it. "At first we thought it was someone's dismembered body," Sato said. "It was quite depressing." He and fellow Greenpeace activist Toru Suzuki had tracked the package to a mail depot in northern Japan after tipsters told them it contained whale meat bound for the country's black market, smuggled by crew members of a ship commissioned to kill the mammals for scientific research, not profit.

Shin Jin-tae says he lives in the unluckiest town on Earth. During World War II, when the Japanese occupied Korea, thousands of residents of this small farming community were shipped to Japan to work in munitions factories. Their destination: Hiroshima. Shin and his family were there on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, when the U.S. military dropped the atomic bomb, leveling the city center and vaporizing many of those within a mile of the blast.

Three years ago, a quirky right-hander little known outside the Orient flew into San Diego, pitched Japan to the World Baseball Classic title and became the biggest import from Asia since Sony. But if you think Daisuke Matsuzaka was special, wait until you see the upgrade. Yu Darvish is younger, taller, throws harder, locates better and has seven devastating pitches that would instantly make him a top-of-the-rotation major league starter.

Japan, which designates every May 5 as Children's Day, had fewer children to celebrate the holiday for the 28th straight year, underscoring a demographic shift that could eventually wreak havoc on the world's second-largest economy. A government report released this week says the number of children younger than 15 as of April 1 had fallen to about 17 million. Japan's proportion of children -- which has been declining for 35 years -- now stands at just 13% of the country's 128 million people.

For workers at the popular Tsukiji fish market, the final indignity may have been when the intoxicated British tourist licked the head of a frozen tuna. In the now-notorious incident, captured by a Japanese TV crew, an irate market official shouted in English, "Get out! Get out!" as the man patted the tuna's gills. Every day, hundreds of sightseers gather in the predawn gloom to witness one of the most popular events on the Tokyo tourist agenda: the daily tuna auction.

With Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton beginning a tour of Asia this week in Tokyo, Japan's economy is suffering from its worst downturn in 35 years, and its prime minister is hanging by his nails to keep his job. Japan's economy, the second-largest in the world after that of the United States, shrank at an annual rate of 12.7% in the final three months of last year, the government said Monday.

As master brewers have done for 13 centuries before him, the sake factory boss is everywhere at once in his rustic timbered building along Japan's rugged northern coastline: helping to drag sacks of rice, gently issuing instructions to his four brewing assistants, consulting with his own boss, a fifth-generation owner.

The history of American art has missed the mark, says curator Alexandra Munroe. It has overlooked the profound and pervasive contribution of Asian philosophy and culture to the caldron, and the exhibition she has spent five years organizing, "The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia: 1860-1989," is going to prove her point. Vast and ambitious, the just-opened exhibition at the Solomon R.

Come hell or high water -- she's actually expecting both -- Nobue Kunizaki will be ready when the dreaded Tokai earthquake finally hits central Japan, whether in the next month or years from now. She's anticipating a temblor that's already got a name as well as estimates on when and where and how mightily it might strike, a guessing game that has rattled even this earthquake-prone nation. But no one, perhaps, is shakier than the petite 39-year-old.