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JAPAN
Feb 22, 2003

Needy find welfare elusive, demeaning

After living homeless in Tokyo's Katsushika Ward for seven years, a 53-year-old former leather tanner was finally helped off the street last year with public livelihood assistance.
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Jan 10, 2003

Focus on cheaper premiums pays off for AFLAC

Consumers going after cheaper products do little to help the nation's deflation woes and usually end up hurting companies in the form of declining sales revenues.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Oct 13, 2002

Confessions over a cup of coffee

ON TSUKUBA PEAK: Tanka by Hatsue Kawamura. Five Islands Press: Wollongong, Australia, z2002, 93 pp., $20/1,500 yen (paper) MEMORIES OF A WOMAN: Tanka by Harue Aoki. Mura Press, Tokyo, 2001, 204 pp., 1,800 yen (paper) Women poets have a long and industrious history in Japan, where they have been writing...
CULTURE / Stage
Oct 6, 2002

Yukio Ninagawa: visionary player on the world's stage

Internationally acclaimed theater director Yukio Ninagawa has staged countless plays in Japan, elsewhere in Asia, and in the United States and Europe.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 29, 2002

Exactly when does old age really begin?

"Put simply, we are having fewer children and living longer," says Michelle Gunn, an Australian journalist and social-affairs writer. Our time is undeniably the age of longevity.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 14, 2002

Felicien Rops: Days of madness

The catalog of the Felicien Rops exhibition is wrapped in the anonymous brown paper more often used to disguise pornography than art. The display itself, now at the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, would, if art galleries issued such things, come with a parental advisory label. With a preponderance...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Aug 11, 2002

Days of the dead: O-bon and the ghosts of Japan

It's that time of year again. The whole of Japan seems to be on the move as people head to their hometowns for the mid-August O-bon festival. And it's not just the living who make travel plans this month. O-bon is the Buddhist holiday when the spirits of the dead are believed to visit the homes of their...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Mar 24, 2002

A greener shade of gray

Ever since Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden, people have been trying to climb back over the fence, because, whatever the attractions of city living, there is nothing like a garden to refresh both body and soul.
COMMENTARY
Mar 10, 2002

Modern delusions of equality

LONDON -- Ask a total stranger about his or her sex life and, though he may be taken aback, he is likely to take it in stride. For what's so secret about sex? Ask a total stranger about his or her income, and she is likely to biff you for your impudence. Money is all secrets and lies.
BUSINESS
Feb 16, 2002

Asahi Mutual to cut stock losses

Asahi Mutual Life Insurance Co. said Friday it will raise 150 billion yen and cut its shareholding losses by 400 billion yen by March 31 in a bid to regain customer trust and stop policy cancellations.
CULTURE / Art
Dec 12, 2001

The world according to Bucky

Naming himself "Guinea Pig B," Buckminster Fuller vowed that his whole life would be an experiment "to see what an unknown individual . . . might be able to do effectively on behalf of all mankind."
JAPAN
Dec 9, 2001

Jazz singer only trying to make today better than yesterday

Making one's musical debut at the age of 40 night be seen a source of amusement in an industry dominated by the younger generation, but for jazz singer Chie Ayado the release of her first album, "For All We Know," in June 1998 was the start of her rise to fame.
CULTURE / Art
Nov 7, 2001

In search of simplicity

In turbulent times, we turn to the simple things of life with relief. But in fine art, simplicity is not easy, and it is a brave painter who spends his life depicting pots and pans, apples and pears.
BUSINESS
Jun 28, 2001

Taiyo-Daido team wins insurer bid

The court-appointed trustee for the defunct Tokyo Mutual Life Insurance Co. has selected the alliance of Taiyo Mutual Life Insurance Co. and Daido Life Insurance Co. as the potential buyer for Tokyo Mutual.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Jun 3, 2001

Lessons in crisis mismanagement

All my life I have been behind the times. I wore my bell-bottoms for years after the fashion had died, and in fact only abandoned them after they had shrunk up and become sort of bell-knickers.
BUSINESS
May 30, 2001

Tokio Marine's group pretax profit surges 58.9%

Tokio Marine & Fire Insurance Co. said Tuesday its group pretax profit for the 2000 business year surged 58.9 percent to 85.45 billion yen.
CULTURE / Books
May 13, 2001

'Earth Mother' Randy Taguchi wins plaudits for her fiction

The novelist Randy Taguchi, known as queen of the e-mail magazine, is enjoying something of a boom. Although she started writing on the Internet in 1996 and now draws some 78,000 readers for the weekly essay she posts on the Web, she came to more general attention when her first novel, "Consent," was...
JAPAN
Feb 25, 2001

'Charismatic housewife' advocates happiness through homemaking

Many Japanese women revere Harumi Kurihara, calling her the "charismatic housewife."
EDITORIALS
Jan 4, 2001

HAL, are you out there?

2001 is not just another year. For over three decades, those four digits symbolized the future, and triggered hopes, dreams and fears about what lay over the horizon. Brilliant though it was, Sir Arthur C. Clarke's imagination and Stanley Kubrick's rendering of life in the 21st century have also missed...
CULTURE / Stage
Nov 11, 2000

Art transcends time in 'Julius Caesar' production

A talented theater director can breathe new life into an old play, and David Lan, the new artistic director of the Young Vic Theater in southeast London, has done just that.
LIFE / Travel
Nov 8, 2000

Cracked earth: A journey through Thailand's arid and impoverished Northeast

"In a bad year, it is not only the plows that break, but the hearts too." -- Pira Sudham, "People of Isan"
JAPAN
Oct 21, 2000

Troubled insurer Kyoei seeks court protection

Kyoei Life Insurance Co., a troubled midsize insurer with liabilities of about 4.5 trillion yen, filed for protection from creditors with the Tokyo District Court on Friday, making it the largest life insurer to collapse since World War II, company officials said.
CULTURE / Books
Oct 17, 2000

Calm rejoicing in simple, ordinary things

OLD TAOIST: THE LIFE, ART, AND POETRY OF KODOJIN (1865-1944), by Stephen Addiss, with translations of and commentary on Chinese poems by Jonathan Chaves, Columbia University Press, 2000, 173 pp., $27.50. The photograph of Kodojin inside this book is very much what the title leads us to expect -- an elderly...
BUSINESS
Sep 19, 2000

Three insurers announce tieup

In the latest round of consolidation in the insurance sector, Tokio Marine & Fire Insurance Co., Asahi Mutual Life Insurance Co. and Nichido Fire & Marine Insurance Co. announced Monday they have agreed to a comprehensive tieup, with a view toward integrating their management in the future.
BUSINESS
Sep 15, 2000

Insurers plan comprehensive alliance

Tokio Marine & Fire Insurance Co., Nichido Fire & Marine Insurance Co. and Asahi Mutual Life Insurance Co. are planning to form a comprehensive tieup with a view to integrating their operations in the future, company sources said Thursday.
BUSINESS
Aug 30, 2000

Taisho exec's fundraising acts scrutinized

Prosecutors are examining the fundraising activities of a Taisho Life Insurance Co. executive who was arrested Monday on suspicion of fraud, sources close to the case said Tuesday.
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Aug 30, 2000

Feeling the pulse of the seasons

Recently, and for the first time, I flew right across Australia. Heading northwest from New Zealand, I crossed Australia's southeast coast somewhere south of Sydney and traversed the country northwest to the coast near Broome.
JAPAN
Aug 27, 2000

Dai-ichi Mutual, Yasuda Fire considering tieup

Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance Co. and Yasuda Fire & Marine Insurance Co. plan to form a comprehensive tieup with a view to integrating their future operations, industrial sources said Saturday.
BUSINESS
Jun 29, 2000

Taisho gets 4.5 billion yen lifeline

The financially ailing Taisho Life Insurance Co. said Wednesday that it has avoided possible collapse by securing a pledge of 4.5 billion yen in fresh capital through outside funding.
EDITORIALS
Feb 18, 2000

Good grief for a good man

In the end, Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz's departure was an eerie case of life seeming to imitate art. Schulz died last Saturday on the eve of the final appearance of his Sunday strip. (Like the last original daily strip, which ran in newspapers in January, it featured a farewell message from Schulz,...

Longform

A small shrine perched atop rocks braves the waves hitting the shoreline during a storm in Shimoda, Shizuoka Prefecture. The area is under threat of a possible 31-meter-high tsunami if an earthquake strikes the nearby Nankai Trough.
If the 'Big One' hits, this city could face a 31-meter-high tsunami