Japan

This is a nation addicted to speed. And to ride Japan's super Shinkansen, or bullet train, is to zip into the future at speeds reaching 186 miles per hour. From Nagoya to Tokyo, the scenery whizzes past in a dizzying blur as the sleek engine with its bullet-like nose floats the cars along elevated tracks -- without the clickety-clack of the lumbering U.S. trains that make you feel as though you're chugging along like cattle to market.

Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui have been the greatest Japanese baseball players of their generation, excelling in the American major leagues just as they did at home. One is a ferociously disciplined singles and doubles hitter, treating at-bats almost like a martial art, acquiring an image as an aloof, machine-like athlete as he chased hitting records on both sides of the Pacific.

The U.S. is initiating a closed-door negotiation that could open new areas to whale hunting for the first time in decades, part of an attempt to end a long-standing impasse over whaling limits with Japan, the world's most avid whaling nation. The tentative plan, outlined in documents obtained by the Washington Post, seeks to achieve a breakthrough in the dispute that has raged since the International Whaling Commission voted in 1986 to ban commercial whaling.

Kudo lost both his job and his home on the same cursed day. His construction boss told him to pack his things and clear out of the company dorm that very afternoon. Just like that, the single 30-year-old from the northern island of Hokkaido joined the ranks of Japan's burgeoning economic underclass. He slept on the subway and camped out at a Denny's, pretending to read a book while sneaking catnaps. He spent his days at a pay phone, dialing for work.

Veteran chef Yutaka Sasaki has a plan to remove the fear of eating one of the most poisonous fish on the planet: He wants to feed it to the emperor. The blowfish, known here as fugu, carries a deadly neurotoxin with no known antidote. An average-sized fugu is chock-full of the poison tetrodotoxin -- in its blood, liver and even its sex organs, Sasaki says. But he scoffs at the centuries-old ban on the Japanese monarch eating the delicacy, sought after by many Japanese as daring cuisine.

They were "pirates" to some, "hostages" to others. But two anti-whaling activists who drew global attention this week by forcibly boarding a Japanese harpoon ship in Antarctic waters have demonstrated how the emotional clash over Japan's annual whale hunt can disrupt even the best international friendships.

Pedigree matters in a country where politics is often a family business. Take a look at the top echelon of Japanese politics: Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda is the son of a prime minister. His predecessor was the grandson of a prime minister. So was the man he defeated to win his party's leadership last fall. And when he looks across the aisle in parliament, he sees yet another second-generation politician leading the opposition. They are just the tip of Japan's hereditary iceberg.

When the Federal Reserve cut a key interest rate by three-quarters of a point this week to bolster the U.S. economy, the Bank of Japan's board of governors could only watch and wish it had room for that kind of aggressive action. In Japan, the prime rate is just 0.5%. With borrowed money already nearly free, the central bank can hardly prime a stumbling economy -- the second-largest behind America's -- with even cheaper cash.

In Japan, the country that gave the world innovations like instant noodles and the Sony Walkman, science has always been seen as a profession that is supposed to produce something useful. The Japanese celebrate the tinkerers and technicians, the no-nonsense types who built the postwar economic dynamo. Pure scientists, cloistered away in underfunded labs and pursuing their dreamy theories, have never caught the national imagination. They just aren't practical enough.

The Japanese prime minister has described the alleged rape of a 14-year-old girl by an American Marine as "unforgivable." The foreign minister declared that Japan has "had enough" of such incidents. And the government's most senior Cabinet official promised that Japan would raise the issue of misconduct with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when she visits next week.