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Abigail Leonard

Abigail Leonard is a Tokyo-based journalist who covers Japanese politics and culture. Stories she reported from Japan earned a 2018 National Headliner Award and a 2018 James Beard Foundation Media Award Nomination. She was a 2011 East-West Center Japan Fellow, a 2010 UN Foundation Journalism Fellow and is currently Vice President of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, a 2,000-member national press club. When she’s not reporting, she enjoys biking around Tokyo with her two kids.

uchimizu event

How Japan keeps its cool when temps are high

Energy

At a recent uchimizu event at the Higo-Hosokawa Garden, participants in lightweight kimonos used wooden ladles to spray water in long arcs that caught the late-afternoon light.

whaling

In Japan, few people eat whale meat anymore, but whaling remains popular

Food
Iwao Hakamada sit I with a window behind him

Free after five decades on death row, a Japanese man may be forced to return

A woman in a black dress stands on a city street in Japan. Signs with Japanese characters are behind her, on restaurants and billboards.

Japan’s youngest female mayor takes on its oldest all-male sport

Naohiro Kimura is founding editor of the "Hikikomori News," for people like him who are shut-ins who have trouble leaving their homes. Japan estimates there are about a half million "hikikomori" (shut-ins) but Kimura thinks the number is much higher.

In Japan, there’s a newspaper by people who couldn’t leave their homes

Culture
Jamal is a Syrian refugee living in Tokyo. He's made friends there and learned Japanese. But he misses Syrian food.

Meet one of the handful of Syrians granted asylum in Japan

Global Politics

In 2016, Japan received a record number of applications for refugee status. It rejected 99 percent of them.