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Eric Prideaux
For Eric Prideaux's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Japan Times
JAPAN
Sep 23, 2005
Breast cancer threat ignored
Japanese women must bring about radical change in their country's health-care culture to stem a worrisome increase in breast cancer, a prominent cancer-awareness advocate said ahead of Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October.
Japan Times
Features / WEEK 3
Sep 18, 2005
Block-rockin' beats hit town
Few things were as emblematic of 1980s America as "breaking," the inner-city dance style whose head-spinning and somersaulting acrobatics became a world sensation.
Japan Times
Features / WEEK 3
Aug 21, 2005
Cartoon duo leads the way in a version of history that's no joke
The phrase "textbook row" has become a regular sighting in Japanese newspapers of late, as newly authorized history books for schools are accused, both at home and abroad, of "glossing over" the bloodier aspects of this country's warmongering, Imperialist past.
Japan Times
Features
Aug 14, 2005
Spared suicide pilot fights in cause of peace
Every Sunday evening finds Masamichi Shida among a group of antiwar protesters outside the train station in Kamakura, south of Tokyo, singing songs opposing Japan's participation in the U.S.-led campaign in Iraq.
Features
Aug 14, 2005
Looking back on brainwashing
Koya Azumi leans over the living-room table at his home outside Tokyo on a warm afternoon, stirring coffee. Birds twitter outside, but otherwise there is only silence. It is a tableau of serenity, of peace.
Japan Times
Features
Jul 10, 2005
Drug firms cashing in
For depression sufferers, medicines to relieve their misery are nothing less than godsends. So they are, too, for those firms pumping ever-more antidepressants into the drug-friendly Japanese market.
Japan Times
Features
Jun 26, 2005
A great way to start
Ever since the first edition of the monthly photojournalism magazine Days Japan was published just over a year ago, the same motto has appeared in the corner of every glossy cover: "A single photograph has the power to change the course of a nation."
Japan Times
Features
Jun 19, 2005
Filming rough
If you are a documentary filmmaker, one surefire way to impress viewers is to expose some aspect of your chosen subject that conventional reporting chooses to ignore.
Japan Times
Features
Jun 12, 2005
Retro points to a rosy retail future
When the four floors of the Nakano Broadway shotengai opened for business in October 1966, resident retailers went for a high-class image in the hopes of attracting a wealthy clientele.
Japan Times
Features / WEEK 3
Apr 17, 2005
Jackpot jottings
While Japan's auto industry is forever being feted, the country's far-bigger pachinko business -- which takes a staggering 30 trillion yen a year in bets -- is almost entirely overlooked by society and the wider world.
Features / WEEK 3
Mar 20, 2005
Quake amateurs shake skeptical pros
With surprisingly little fanfare, the Japan Meteorological Agency, which keeps tabs on tens of thousands of earthquakes a year, has been setting up a network of ultra-sensitive electronic motion detectors that will pick up on the kind of minute seismic quivering that heralds a major quake.
Japan Times
Features / WEEK 3
Feb 20, 2005
Sit down and be counted!
One chilly Friday morning last month, high-school teacher Noriyuki Ishida had probably the most stressful experience of his 35-year career.
Japan Times
Features / WEEK 3
Jan 16, 2005
Wota lota love
The 90-minute event on the eighth floor of an electronics shop in Tokyo's Akihabara district one recent Sunday afternoon was unlike anything you'd expect to encounter in the bubble-gum world of Japanese teen fashion.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Jan 9, 2005
Keiko Sakai: Conundrum Iraq
One year ago this month, an advance team from Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) arrived in Iraq on a mission -- so the Japanese public was told -- to help rebuild the wartorn country. The rest of the main contingent of 600 troops soon followed.
Features
Dec 12, 2004
'Trophy' reflects on what might have been but for bed freeze-out
Seated elegantly at a table in a Tokyo cafe, 37-year-old Kazumi Nakazawa is recalling the brief period seven years ago when it wasn't obvious her marriage was doomed.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Dec 12, 2004
Until dearth do us part
It is a condition that many married Japanese know all too well.
Features
Dec 12, 2004
Sex-starved wives get men on prescription
Champions of conventional concepts of matrimony may well be shocked -- dismayed, even -- by the current slew of stories in Japanese magazines detailing just how likely the nation's married women are to have sex outside their marriages.
Features
Dec 12, 2004
'Clueless' husband rues lost love
Masatoshi Hoshino, a 56-year-old distribution company manager in Tokyo, had an arranged marriage 16 years ago to a woman he met just six months before.
Features
Dec 12, 2004
'Betrayal' in bed began after happy family was complete
As he was growing up, Shinsuke Horiuchi assumed marriage and physical affection went hand-in-hand. Then wedlock showed him how wrong he was.
Features
Dec 12, 2004
Cold comfort feeling warmth
Hiroko Kataoka is a cosmopolitan 35-year-old who has lived abroad and was working at a prestigious investment bank in Tokyo when she met Masaki, 36, at a corporate party.

Longform

When trying to trace your lineage in Japan, the "koseki" is the most important form of document you'll encounter.
Climbing the branches of a Japanese family tree