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LIFE / Food & Drink
Jan 13, 2000

A winning resolution: wine tastings among friends

If you've already broken a few New Year's resolutions, welcome to the club: You belong to the majority. But don't worry; just put a positive new twist on the onerous matter of New Year resolutions. Resolve to make wine an even greater pleasure. Herewith, a few ideas:
JAPAN
Jan 13, 2000

India pursuing CTBT, Fernandes says

Visiting Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes brushed aside international criticism Thursday by reiterating that New Delhi is stepping up efforts to gain a national consensus on signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a global pact to prohibit nuclear testing. Speaking at the Japan National Press...
LIFE / Food & Drink
Jan 13, 2000

Come in from out of the cold

Finally we can put behind us the Christmas leftovers and the Hogmanay hangovers (not to mention the Y2chaos that never was) and assume some semblance of normality. Don't get the wrong idea -- we certainly put away our fair share of mince pies and Gaultier-clad millennial champagne over the holidays....
JAPAN
Jan 13, 2000

Countdown starts to citizens' poll on dam

TOKUSHIMA -- Residents of the city of Tokushima were officially notified Thursday of a Jan. 23 plebiscite on the controversial Yoshino River dam project -- the first such vote to be held on a central government-initiated major public works plan. The plebiscite will ask local voters whether they support...
JAPAN
Jan 13, 2000

Dam opposition group rallies for vote in plebiscite

Staff writer TOKUSHIMA -- The group smiled and waved as they jogged through the city of Tokushima earlier this week, calling on local residents to go to the polls. Theirs is no usual campaign. The men and women on this two-day "sacred run" are part of an effort by local citizens' groups to rally residents...
EDITORIALS
Jan 12, 2000

Sliding toward recovery

Japan's economic prospects are improving. After a decade of stagnation, the consensus forecast is that a fragile recovery will, with careful tending, continue. The emphasis belongs on "fragile," however, not "recovery." While the future holds many unknowns, the government can do its part to minimize...
COMMUNITY
Jan 12, 2000

Camellias and camels on Izu Oshima

Izu Oshima has another special attraction: the camellia park. The whole park has an area of 327 hectares, including the camellia garden, a small zoo and a campground known as Umi no Furusato Mura, situated close to the Goze River, all managed by the Tokyo Parks Department.
BUSINESS
Jan 12, 2000

Sunkus plans virtual supermarket venture

Japanese convenience store operator Sunkus and Associates Inc. said Wednesday it will set up a joint venture with five other firms from Jan. 31 to operate an e-commerce supermarket.
JAPAN
Jan 12, 2000

Farm official offers to resign over co-op bribes

An official of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has tendered his resignation for receiving favors from a cooperative association in Kagawa Prefecture, ministry officials said. Tsuguo Joko, an assistant division head at the Agricultural Structure Improvement Bureau, offered to quit...
JAPAN
Jan 12, 2000

Austrian ambassador aims for mature ties

Austria's new ambassador to Japan, Hans Dietmar Schweisgut, said Wednesday he hopes to work for a more matured partnership between his country and Japan, which last year marked the 130th anniversary of bilateral relations. In order to expand ties, the two countries will have to develop more mutual trade...
LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA
Jan 12, 2000

We have a future

Another megamerger, another Internet world-eating conglomerate emerges. Apart from its size, the AOL-Time/Warner deal is a big deal: The marriage of AOL and Time Warner matters (if it goes throtwo reasons. First, it combines one of the biggest Net presences with a broadband delivery systefinally makes...
JAPAN
Jan 12, 2000

Kanematsu to ax lump-sum retirement, hike wages

Kanematsu Textile Corp., a subsidiary of trading house Kanematsu Corp., has abolished its system of providing employees with a lump sum payment at retirement and will raise monthly wages instead, company officials said Wednesday. The move was in response to requests from employees and a trend in the...
COMMUNITY / How-tos / GETTING THINGS DONE
Jan 12, 2000

Win some, lose some

Like many of our readers, I continue to miss Gary Larson's The Far Side cartoons. Now I have 366 of them in a millennium collection brought up to date with color and appropriate historic dates which the publisher, Andrews McMeel of Kansas City, calls "a refreshingly irreverent retrospective of the last...
JAPAN
Jan 12, 2000

Employers call for shake up by sharing jobs, cutting wages

As a way of maintaining the current level of employment as well as creating new jobs, the Japan Federation of Employers' Associations (Nikkeiren) proposed that wages be reduced and job-sharing be adopted by more firms in its annual report released Wednesday. The business organization's report is regarded...
EDITORIALS
Jan 11, 2000

Declaring war against AIDS

It is reckoned that the AIDS scourge began about 20 years ago. In the two decades since then, it has claimed more than 16 million lives. The World Health Organization estimates that 33.6 million people, 1.2 million of them children, live with the HIV infection that is the disease's precursor. The speed...
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 11, 2000

End the dangerous illusions

In this final year of the 20th century, there are several key lessons we should learn from this turbulent period. First, as a Japanese I want to point out that Japan modernized with remarkable success in the first half of the century. Following its victory in the Russo-JapaneseWar (1904-05), the nation...
BUSINESS
Jan 11, 2000

Minicar sales hit record high in '99

Sales of new minicars in 1999 jumped 21.2 percent from the previous year to 1.88 million units, the highest annual figure since the Japan Mini Vehicles Association started taking statistics in 1967, the association said Tuesday.
JAPAN
Jan 11, 2000

'Unfair' decorations system under review

The government and the Liberal Democratic Party are promoting a review of the decoration system for the first time in 36 years. At the end of last year, Shizuka Kamei, chairman of the LDP's Policy Affairs Research Council, called for reforming the system for granting prestigious decorations to civil...
JAPAN
Jan 11, 2000

LDP downplays Osaka rift, backs Ota for governor

Top executives of the Liberal Democratic Party formally decided Tuesday to back a former trade ministry official for the upcoming gubernatorial election in Osaka, despite a rebellion from its Osaka chapter, which supports a different candidate. On Tuesday evening, LDP Secretary General Yoshiro Mori...
CULTURE / Music
Jan 11, 2000

Ani DiFranco's hard road leads her to a higher plane

Last year, the prolific Ani DiFranco released three albums. Any record company marketing executive would tell you that's more than the market could take. But then, DiFranco doesn't have to answer to any record company. She owns her own.
JAPAN
Jan 11, 2000

Ring funneling cash to China busted

OSAKA -- Police here recently announced that after a yearlong investigation, they have broken up an underground banking operation that funneled an estimated 20 billion yen a year to China through an elaborate network of falsified accounts in Tokyo and Osaka.
JAPAN
Jan 11, 2000

Allstate withdraws Japanese operations

Allstate Property and Casualty Insurance Japan Co., a Japanese subsidiary of a major U.S. insurance group, said Tuesday it will withdraw from operations here -- only nine months after its launch. The move follows the group's review of its business strategy late last year, officials said, adding that...
JAPAN
Jan 11, 2000

Yachiyo Bank to take over failed Kokumin

Yachiyo Bank and state-appointed administrators of Kokumin Bank announced Tuesday that the two parties have reached a basic agreement to have Yachiyo take over the failed second-tier regional bank. Of the five second-tier regional banks that went under after the financial reconstruction law took effect...
JAPAN
Jan 11, 2000

Aum will leave when ready, Joyu says

YOKOHAMA -- People living near a Yokohama condominium containing an Aum Shinrikyo office demanded Tuesday that former cult spokesman Fumihiro Joyu and other followers immediately leave the area. The written demand by a town council, shop owners and local residents came after the neighborhood was thrown...
EDITORIALS
Jan 10, 2000

School discipline applies to all

Media reports of the increasing number of violent incidents in the nation's public elementary and junior and senior high schools have made "classroom collapse" part of the everyday language. The reports nearly always refer to these incidents as examples of a breakdown in school discipline, but "discipline"...
COMMENTARY
Jan 10, 2000

Samurai values to the rescue

The biggest challenge for Japan as it greets the new millennium is implementing drastic political, economic and educational reforms, comparable to those carried out in the Meiji Restoration and after the end of World War II. Plans must include major fiscal reform, restructuring of the banking system,...
CULTURE / Books
Jan 10, 2000

How to level the business playing field

CRISIS AND OPPORTUNITY IN A CHANGING JAPAN, by William R. Farrell, with a foreward by Walter F. Mondale. Westport/London: Quorum Books, 1999, 275 pp., $60 (cloth). It's the Black Ships, round II. JETRO reports that foreign direct investment into Japan leaped 89.4 percent last year, topping $10 billion...
CULTURE / Books
Jan 10, 2000

Getting under a tattooist's skin

TATTOOING THE INVISIBLE MAN: Bodies of Work, 1955-1999, by Don Ed Hardy. edited by Francesca Passalacqua. Santa Monica, Calif.: Smart Art Press/Hardy Marks Publications, 1999, 300 pp., profusely illustrated, color and b/w, $90. In 1972 Don Ed Hardy, already a tattoo artist of note, made his first trip...
JAPAN
Jan 10, 2000

Make 'Rebuilding Confidence' the government slogan for 2000

Last year a series of mishaps shook our faith in various things we have grown to trust over the years, from the H-II rocket failure and the crumbling tunnels of our shinkansen lines to the nuclearcriticality accident in Tokai, Ibaraki Prefecture.
JAPAN
Jan 10, 2000

Vietnamese set up residents' network

Some 60 exchange students and former refugees from Vietnam met in Kawasaki on Monday to launch the first nationwide network of Vietnamese residents of Japan. Members of 10 different support groups for people who fled to Japan after the Vietnam War ended in 1975 marked the start of the Network of Vietnamese...

Longform

Mount Fuji is considered one of Japan's most iconic symbols and is a major draw for tourists. It's still a mountain, though, and potential hikers need to properly prepare for any climb.
What it takes to save lives on Mount Fuji