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CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Feb 27, 2002

Hanayo and Tenko: through a lens blurrily

Cocky, irreverant and devil-may-care, invariably to be found surrounded by admirers as he holds forth from behind a big fat cigar, the Neo-Pop painter Takashi Murakami has for the last few years been one of Japan's leading international art stars.
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Feb 25, 2002

Memoir sheds light on Chinese atrocity

NEW YORK -- My businessman friend Michio Hamaji, whose avowed mission is to improve international understanding, recently brought me a Japanese book titled "Charz." He told me it's a childhood memoir describing a Chinese atrocity in the late 1940s. If translated into English and published in the United...
COMMENTARY
Feb 25, 2002

U.S. stake in Japan's revival

The Tokyo summit between Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and U.S. President George W. Bush demonstrated that Japan's economic revival has strategic importance for security in East Asia. The Japan-U.S. alliance is no longer based merely on military cooperation; it now hinges on Japan's economic clout...
BUSINESS
Feb 25, 2002

Analysts expect gradual Japan recovery

Japan is capable of overcoming its deep-seated economic problems, according to experts attending a recent symposium in London, but Western-based analysts were less optimistic than their Japanese counterparts that there is sufficient resolve at the political and boardroom levels to make the transition...
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 23, 2002

English in U.S. doesn't need protection

Twenty-six American states have already passed laws declaring English their official language. Iowa wants to make it 27.
JAPAN
Feb 23, 2002

Globalization is both a bonus and curse, Nobelist Sen says

Although globalization has produced remarkable opportunities and improvements in the lives of people around the world, there are a number of others who have suffered increased insecurity, according to an Indian scholar who, in 1998, became the first Asian economist to win a Nobel Prize.
BUSINESS
Feb 23, 2002

Japan to listen as it decides on crucial WTO stance

Japan will begin work on formulating its negotiating position on an issue that is likely to sharply pit industrialized countries against developing economies in the recently launched round of global trade liberalization talks -- the environment.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle / MATTER OF COURSE
Feb 22, 2002

The serious business of clubbing together

My 10-year-old is in the school basketball club but is thinking about switching to another club. He's been agonizing over this decision, which tells you something about the importance of school clubs in Japan.
EDITORIALS
Feb 21, 2002

Mr. Milosevic in the dock

The war crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, which began this month in The Hague, is the most important such case in history. For the first time since those crimes were codified in international law, a former leader is being tried for atrocities committed while he was in power....
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 21, 2002

A gesture can go a long way

Will history repeat itself today?
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 21, 2002

At last, Washington trashes junk science

WASHINGTON -- Back in December 2000, U.S. President Bill Clinton and Vice President Gore were busy fellows -- what with dishes to pack, furniture to ship and an election to contest. So busy were they that they neglected to read some of the fine print in a cascade of administration-ending paperwork. One...
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Feb 21, 2002

Living under pressure

Life, as we knew it only a few decades ago, needed sunlight and warmth. No one imagined that anything could survive in extreme environments -- in intolerable places such as high-pressure, high-temperature deep-sea vents or under Antarctic ice sheets.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Feb 20, 2002

Woman calls British ex-POWs to Japan

LONDON -- Keiko Holmes had expected hostility, but when she attended the annual conference of the British Far East Prisoners of War Association in London in 1991, the bitterness harbored by the more than 1,000 veterans and their families present nearly erupted into violence.
COMMENTARY
Feb 19, 2002

Koizumi fast losing his luster

The entire affair involving Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's dismissal of Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka on Jan. 29 reminded me of an old saying that "nothing is predictable in politics." Following Koizumi's move, his government's public-approval rating plummeted to about 50 percent after remaining...
LIFE / Travel
Feb 19, 2002

Back to nature on Yakushima Island

If you live in urban Japan, probably the only sky you see is sliced up by powerlines; trees grow in tiny parks hemmed in by concrete buildings and polluted expressways. Whatever happened to Japan's traditional love of nature?
JAPAN
Feb 18, 2002

Bush arrives in Tokyo, keeps hard line on 'axis'

U.S. President George W. Bush arrived in Tokyo on Sunday afternoon for his first visit to Japan since his inauguration last year, on the first leg of a six-day tour of East Asia that will also take him to South Korea and China.
EDITORIALS
Feb 17, 2002

Open food-supply system needed

Five months have passed since the first case of mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) was confirmed in Japan. The use of meat and bone meal, which is suspected to have transmitted the disease, has been banned, and testing for all cows has been introduced. But Japanese livestock farmers,...
LIFE / Food & Drink / THE WAY OF WASHOKU
Feb 17, 2002

Mmmm . . . tastes like crab

In virtually every cuisine on the planet, there are attempts to dress food up and make it look like something it isn't. Whether it's a classical Chinese cook carving vegetables to make them look like a phoenix, or a French chef twisting his bread dough to resemble a lobster, food often appears in costume....
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Feb 17, 2002

Donald Richie rewinds a century of film

Donald Richie has always struck me as the ideal role model for the aspiring writer. More the distiller than the brewer, the cordon-bleu chef than the bone-cook, there is much to be learned from Richie's refinements.
JAPAN
Feb 16, 2002

Festival focuses on Tokyo's role in animated films

A three-day international exhibition of animated films opened Friday at Tokyo Big Sight, with the aim of promoting Tokyo as the capital of the animation industry, organizers said.
JAPAN
Feb 16, 2002

Antiwar campaigners to donate documents to Vietnamese museum

Members of a Japanese group that campaigned against the Vietnam War will visit Ho Chi Minh City later this month to donate materials and documents detailing their activities in the 1960s and 1970s to the state-run War Remnants Museum.
JAPAN
Feb 14, 2002

Animated film festival kicks off Friday in Tokyo

An international festival on animated films opens Friday at Tokyo's Big Sight convention center along Tokyo Bay.
COMMENTARY
Feb 13, 2002

Wrong cure for Japan's economic ills

So U.S. President George W. Bush has decided the future of Asia depends on overcoming Japan's puzzling, decade-long economic stagnation. But do he or his advisers understand what is really wrong with that economy?
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 13, 2002

A traveler possessed by light

Part of the game of art nowadays is for artists, whatever their influence or orientation, to avoid classification. Once this happens, their work often devolves into well-worm cultural cliche. One 20th-century artist who escaped this process, though, was Paul Klee (1879- 1940), whose work is as hard to...
LIFE / Travel / NATURE TRAVEL
Feb 11, 2002

California prehistory mired in La Brea tar pits

LA BREA, Calif. -- The world, 40,000 years ago -- The weather's perfect. A warm breeze from the Pacific rustles the palms, there's the sharp tang of juniper and pine in the air, and the nameless mountains, which rise beyond the plain that will one day be Los Angeles, glow mauve in the early morning sun....
EDITORIALS
Feb 10, 2002

The lion king of Kabul

He was the most famous lion in the world," says the hand-painted metal sign hanging on an empty cage amid the ruins of Kabul's Zoo. His name was Marjan, and though the sign makes a bold claim on his behalf, it doesn't exaggerate.
COMMENTARY
Feb 9, 2002

Can U.S. find the right voice?

LONDON -- The United States is the predominant force in the world -- more so than ever. Its military reach is awesome (as Afghanistan has proved), its technology at the forefront, its universities the most advanced, its Nobel laureates the most numerous, its production now back to almost 30 percent of...

Longform

After the asset-price bubble crash of the early 1990s, employment at a Japanese company was no longer necessarily for life. As a result, a new generation is less willing to endure a toxic work culture —life’s too short, after all.
How Japan's youth are slowly changing the country's work ethic