The monarchy of Japan is the oldest-surviving one in the world. The reign of Emperor Jimmu, the founder of the Yamato dynasty and the first emperor of Japan, began in 660 BC. Emperor Suizei succeeded Jimmu, and the emperorship has prevailed thus for centuries now through traditional succession. As of today, the Yamato dynasty, revered as the Imperial House of Japan, has a…
Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998), the man who ruled Japanese cinema for five decades, was born to a samurai family, in Tokyo. Young Kurosawa was introduced to cinema by his father, who took his eight children to the movies to familiarize them with Western culture. In his school days, he was attracted to art and painting, after being…
Asia, the largest continent on Earth, has a total land area of 44,579,000 square kilometers. It constitutes 30 per cent of the total available land area. The continent tops the list even in terms of population. More than 4.1 billion people reside in Asia, which is 60 per cent of the entire global population, with a population…
The Japanese engineers found an ingenious way to make the best use of the available space when they built the exit of the Hanshin Highway through the Gate Tower building in Fukushima-ku, Osaka. The exit passes between the fifth and seventh floors of the building. The elevators pass through these floors without stopping. There is…
In 1932 Los Angeles Olympics there were three teams, India, Japan and the USA, in men’s hockey. India won the gold by defeating Japan and USA respectively by 11–1 and 24–1. When it came to raising funds for sending the team to Los Angeles, a journalist representing the Indian Hockey Federation approached Mahatma Gandhi to…
Located on the Alaskan island of Unimak, Mount Shishaldin is the highest mountain in the Aleutian Islands. The snow clad mountain was formed 10,000 years ago after a volcanic eruption. It is conical in shape, which is more symmetric than Mount Fuji of Japan.
