author

 
 

Meta

Jane Singer
For Jane Singer's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Jan 19, 2013
Kyoto gardens give up all their secrets during intimate guided tours
How do you appreciate a Japanese garden? The typical temple visit — where you ponder a seemingly random assemblage of rocks and raked gravel or push your way through a throng of tourists jostling for camera angles — can leave one confused and underwhelmed.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Nov 24, 2012
Sri Lankan keen to showcase Japanese innovation
Monte Cassim, 65, slips effortlessly from English to Japanese and back, as befits one of the few non-Japanese to have served as president of a major Japanese university. After heading Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Beppu, Oita Prefecture, from 2004 to 2009, the Sri Lankan architect and engineer is now a professor at Ritsumeikan University, vice chancellor of The Ritsumeikan Trust and director of the university's Peace Museum.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Aug 11, 2012
Import club caters to need for home comfort
The blonde man in shorts and a baseball cap, sporting a lopsided grin and a dangling backpack and parking a rusty bicycle, looked less like a captain of industry than a superannuated college student. Yet American Chuck Grafft, 50, is founder and CEO of Foreign Buyers Club, one of the largest importers of Western consumer goods to Japan.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
May 26, 2012
Head monk of Kyoto temple takes Buddhism into the community
Climb the stone walkway, stippled with fallen red camellia blossoms, that leads to Kyoto's Honen-in Temple, past a mossy thatched gate and raised platforms of sand combed in tight patterns of waves and chrysanthemums, and you enter a hushed and otherworldly space at the foot of Mount Daimonji.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jan 28, 2012
Kyoto-based Italian physicist blazes trail for foreign academics
Professor Giuseppe Pezzotti, 51, a materials scientist at Kyoto Institute of Technology, effortlessly switches from a newspaper interview in English to discuss research collaboration with a colleague in fluent Japanese. Even sartorially, he straddles East and West: While his torso is clad in button-down shirt, khaki pants and lime green sweater, his bare feet are crammed into Japanese zori sandals. This is a man not bound by conventions.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Dec 10, 2011
Every print a poem, artist's self-portrait
Woodblock prints, or moku hanga, may seem to be the quintessential Japanese art, but they have been embraced by artists around the world.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Oct 22, 2011
Briton aims to restore poets' peak to former glory
Nineteen university students and civic-minded Kyoto residents squat on a mountain pass on a cloudless afternoon in early October as a tall British poet, Stephen Gill, 58, reads from a collection of haiku.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Sep 3, 2011
American trumpeter makes his horn sing in Kansai clubs
On a Sunday in early August, American trumpeter James Barrett led his band through a set featuring rhythmic jazz and world music beats as part of the Saiin Music Festival in western Kyoto.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jun 18, 2011
American woman pours self into noh
According to Rebecca Ogamo Teele, an American instructor, performer and mask carver for noh, falling asleep is a perfectly respectable response to attending such plays.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Apr 23, 2011
Disaster expert seeks better tsunami defense
A town hall located several kilometers inland was the designated disaster evacuation site in Minamisanriku, Miyagi Prefecture. Immediately after the magnitude 9 earthquake hit Tohoku on the afternoon of March 11, a young town employee broadcast an urgent evacuation order to local residents. Her broadcasts continued until the tsunami hit, submerging the announcer, the evacuees and the hall itself.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Feb 26, 2011
Committed to 'making it work' as foreign wife
Forty-five years spent living in the Kobe area as the American wife of a Japanese businessman must change a person. Yet Winnie Inui, 68, still welcomes visitors to her suburban home in Ashiya, Hyodo Prefecture, with a blanket of felicitous concern ("Enough tea, dear?") and a flair for storytelling that remains true to her Boston Irish roots.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jan 29, 2011
New Yorker finds success within himself in Kyoto
American restaurateur Charles Roche, 62, credits his love of feting others to having grown up in the warm and noisy embrace of an extended Italian-American family in the Bronx. As part of a food-loving clan he jokingly refers to as "the Sopranos without the crime," he remembers splitting chestnuts and grating cheese in the kitchen while his Aunt Tess prepared homemade pasta for 50.
COMMUNITY
Dec 4, 2010
American artist's creativity never stops in Kyoto
Daniel Kelly's immaculate central Kyoto atelier is empty upon arrival, but soon the artist comes bounding in, extending warm greetings before leading a quick tour of the two-floor studio-living quarters. Then we're off again, dashing around the corner to check out his kura (warehouse)-cum-art storehouse and guest quarters, then down the street to a traditional soy sauce factory that he says just must be experienced.
LIFE
Oct 24, 2010
Striving to stave off marine extinctions
Although oceans cover 73 percent of the surface of the Earth, little is known about marine plant and animal biodiversity.
Japan Times
LIFE
Oct 24, 2010
Key facts and figures
Key data drawn from numerous quoted sources here succinctly suggest the enormous range of problems and issues facing delegates to COP10 — and the world.
LIFE
Oct 24, 2010
An ABC of CBD acronyms
Don't know your MOP from your COP? You're not alone. United Nations conferences are awash with organizational and procedural monikers containing more letters than a Welsh train station sign.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Sep 18, 2010
Thierry's table offers bountiful taste of France
The cartoon character adorning ads and menus for the Kyoto restaurant Le Table de Thierry, it turns out, is a pretty good approximation of the owner himself: an upbeat, grande-size French-Togolese chef with a passion for demystifying French cuisine.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jul 31, 2010
Long journey to safe harbor in an unpredictable world
Knowing Japanese troops had caused the deaths of her father's parents and siblings in World War II, Japan was about the last place Ha Thi Thanh Nga expected to end up. Today — some 30 years after arriving here as a refugee — Nga, 49, is helping other compatriots make lives for themselves here.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jun 19, 2010
Canadian keeps options open via multitask tack
When Osaka-based entrepreneur Ray Kruger, 60, takes a break from a 70-hour work week to reminisce, his stories command attention. He explains about the haunted Buddhist temple he owns in the mountains near Kameoka, Kyoto Prefecture, a 440-year-old registered national treasure still used for occasional funerals and village rites, and his hilltop villa on an island in the Seto Inland Sea, where he brings friends and employees for water skiing and boating.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
May 22, 2010
The bright career of a literary 'shadow hero'
American author Paul Auster once called translators "the shadow heroes of literature," who have enabled us to understand that we all live in one world. He could also be describing Juliet Winters Carpenter, 61, one of the best-known literary translators from Japanese to English, who has won praise for her ability to channel the voices of Japanese writers into readable, often colloquial English and yet somehow retain their distinctive style.

Longform

A statue of "Dragon Ball" character Goku stands outside the offices of Bandai Namco in Tokyo. The figure is now as recognizable as such characters as Mickey Mouse and Spider-Man.
Akira Toriyama's gift to the world