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JAPAN
Jan 20, 2002

Entrance exams begin for university hopefuls

Annual preliminary university entrance examinations administered by the government began Saturday at 684 locations nationwide to screen 602,089 applicants with tests in six subjects.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 20, 2002

Lingual skills key to global communication

You would think that four national languages would be enough. Not for the Swiss. Along with German, French, Italian and Romansh, English is making considerable inroads.
JAPAN
Jan 20, 2002

American brings kabuki to Japanese as well as foreigners

Mark Oshima never imagined he would appear on a kabuki stage when he first arrived in Japan in 1981, taking a year off from university to write his senior thesis on a theme that had nothing to do with the classical Japanese theater.
COMMUNITY
Jan 20, 2002

Tandoori meets takoyaki in Kansai's Little India

KOBE -- The port city of Kobe, with the largest concentration of Americans and Europeans in the Kansai region, a few of whom have lived in Japan since the Taisho Era (1912-1926), has long been known as one of Japan's most Westernized cities.
COMMUNITY
Jan 20, 2002

When something Western this way came

Like a Yankee daimyo, on Nov. 23, 1857, Townsend Harris made a progress to Edo (now Tokyo) from his residence in Shimoda on the Izu Peninsula. Proceeded by an American flag made of Japanese crepe, Harris, on horseback, was escorted by a guard of six whose costumes bore the coat-of-arms of the United...
CULTURE / Music
Jan 20, 2002

Blonde Redhead: Melody of the inexpressible

New York's Blonde Redhead is an excellent reminder of what made "indie" rock independent in the first place. Trying to pin them down, to encapsulate their music in a pithy phrase or two is, to quote the title of their fourth album, like trying to give "an expression of the unexpressible."
EDITORIALS
Jan 18, 2002

Shunto's role being tested

Japan's largest labor and management groups have kicked off their annual round of negotiations, with each side releasing a position paper. Basically the two sides agree that under present circumstances protecting jobs is more important than raising wages. That sounds reasonable enough, given that the...
LIFE / Digital / SURFERSPUD
Jan 17, 2002

Chives or chocolate on that, spuds?

www.chocovader.com/ I love how candy aisles in Japanese convenience stores have become shrines to the branded characters of pop culture, shrines where no one pays their respects to the chocolate, which has become a wrap-around commodity to get collectibles placed at kid's eye level. The altars have been...
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / NAME OF THE GAME
Jan 17, 2002

Nintendo's Arakawa surprises with retirement announcement

Nobody really cared who the president of Nintendo of America was when Minoru Arakawa founded the company in 1980. With games like "Radarscope" and "Sheriff," it was just another Taito wannabe trying to break into the U.S. arcade market.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 16, 2002

All-out attack

Visionaries, alleged pornographers, artists of enduring repute -- Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele both died in 1918. With them ended the first flowering of the Vienna Secession, an artistic movement that declared war on the Establishment in the cause of liberty and modernity. "Der Zeit ihre Kunst (Art...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jan 16, 2002

Getting to where the action is in Chekhov theater workshop

Los Angeles-based international director and acting teacher Louis Fantasia will be returning to Tokyo next month to continue his series of training workshops with an intensive 10-day session on acting.
MORE SPORTS
Jan 15, 2002

Japan Energy bags national basketball title

Noriko Hamaguchi scored 13 of her 26 points in the final quarter Sunday as the defending champion Japan Energy Sunflowers crushed the Chanson V-Magic 86-59 in the women's final for their 11th title of the national basketball championships.
JAPAN
Jan 14, 2002

Fuchu trots out story of horse racing

Horses, once essential for farming and transport, have all but disappeared from modern Japan -- except to fuel our sense of competition at the track.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jan 13, 2002

No recovery in sight for Japanese book publishing industry

One often sees references in the Japanese media to the "lost decade" that followed the burst of the speculative bubble in the early 1990s, but the publishing world has only suffered a half decade of negative growth. After five consecutive years of falling sales, however, it can no longer ignore systemic...
COMMUNITY
Jan 13, 2002

Seafood central: Tokyo's Tsukiji market

"For Japanese, fish is the very best thing in the world," Sadao Ohashi declares with pride as he pushes his medieval-looking, two-wheeled wooden cart at jogging speed, maneuvering a load of mackerel, squid and sea bream through the moving maze of carts, people and battered one-man trucks that throng...
BUSINESS
Jan 12, 2002

TSE moves into the education game

The Tokyo Stock Exchange is sponsoring seminars on stock trading for university students with the hope they will return to the market as investors in the future.
JAPAN
Jan 11, 2002

NPOs make mark by preserving the past

Kyodo News Members of nonprofit organizations are making strenuous efforts to preserve traditional Japanese structures and townscapes and develop regional communities.
EDITORIALS
Jan 11, 2002

How to spell recovery

This is an important year for the international economy. Most crucial will be its path after the worst slump in decades. That trajectory depends, in large part, on developments in the United States. Initial signs are promising: The U.S. looks poised to recover, but the strength and durability of the...
JAPAN
Jan 11, 2002

Fujimori gives lecture at university in Tokyo

Alberto Fujimori, Peru's disgraced former president, made his first public appearance in 14 months Thursday, delivering a lecture at Takushoku University in Tokyo.
EDITORIALS
Jan 10, 2002

A tough diplomatic challenge

In his first year in office, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi devoted most of his energy to promoting his economic-reform agenda. In doing so he demonstrated considerable leadership, supported by record public-approval ratings. In 2002, he faces an equally tough challenge on the diplomatic front. His...
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 9, 2002

Argentina: A nation too few believe in

LONDON -- Five presidents in 12 days; riots and looting that have left 32 dead; the biggest default on sovereign debt in history; and the prospect of a return to military government or a toned-down, spruced-up version of fascism lurking around the corner. What is wrong with Argentina?
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 9, 2002

Back from the brink

The German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) said that people not drawing on 3,000 years of tradition are living on the edge of extinction. How, then, did Japanese craftsmen recover from the trauma of World War II, when their proud traditions, seemingly tainted by recent history, were thrown...
COMMENTARY
Jan 8, 2002

India set to keep full press on Pakistan

NEW DELHI -- The biggest question now is whether war will break out between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan. Although no right-minded citizen in either country wants war, many forget that Pakistan has thrust an undeclared war on India for years, bleeding India noticeably. Thus the aim is not...
JAPAN
Jan 7, 2002

Princess Takamatsu backs idea of reigning empress

Princess Takamatsu has penned an article for publication in a biweekly magazine in which she expresses her support for the possibility that Japan may one day have a reigning empress, it was learned Sunday.
COMMENTARY
Jan 7, 2002

Fine-tuning needed for globalization

In the new year, the world will have to grapple with daunting political and economic challenges that surfaced toward the end of the 20th century. The terror attacks in the United States on Sept. 11 -- which The Economist called the "the day the world changed" -- complicated the problems.
JAPAN
Jan 7, 2002

Mad cow solution remains elusive

On Sept. 22, the Japanese government announced what had been suspected for more than a month: that a dairy cow raised in Chiba Prefecture had indeed been infected with a brain-wasting disease.
COMMUNITY
Jan 6, 2002

Life in the new year: Que sera sera

What joys and sorrows will the coming year bring for Japan? Fast forward to Jan. 1, 2003, apply tongue firmly to cheek and enjoy the benefit of hindsight by reading the alternative futures contained in the 2002 diaries of long-suffering Tokyo banker Gamansuruzo Nostrodoomus, and go-getting Kansai career...
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 5, 2002

South Asian drumbeats of war

NEW DELHI -- Exactly one week after a terrorist attack on India's Parliament that left over a dozen people dead, I visited a senior lawmaker in that building. The atmosphere was as heavy with anger and determination as shock and trauma. Preparations for war were obvious everywhere, including troop movements...

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