Search - history

 
 
CULTURE / Art
Mar 11, 2001

Swords and chrysanthemums

Modern warfare is increasingly being depersonalized by long-range missiles, so-called smart bombs, and the virtual battlefield of electronic information. The current exhibition at the Nezu Museum takes us back to an era when our dirty work wasn't done for us by computers but was up-close and personal,...
COMMENTARY / Japan
Mar 10, 2001

Timetable for a departure

On March 5, the Lower House voted down an opposition-sponsored no-confidence motion against the Cabinet of Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori. Theoretically, the apparent vote of confidence for the Mori Cabinet should have restored a semblance of political stability, but things do not work that way in Japanese...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 10, 2001

Taliban's defiance isolates Afghanistan

ISLAMABAD -- As if the destruction of some key human values were not enough to satisfy the blind zeal of Afghanistan's Taliban rulers, they have now turned their guns on historical relics.
CULTURE / Film
Mar 10, 2001

A real woman is hard to find

The problem with "women's movies" is this: Too often, they make you think that the world out there belongs to men. Otherwise, how could they keep painting the same old pictures of women struggling to gain self-respect, raise children, find true love, bond witheach other, etc.? In the real world, women...
CULTURE / Art / CERAMIC SCENE
Mar 10, 2001

An innovative, magical potter

Meiji Era craftsmen lived in a world of divergent influences: Galle glass, French bronzes, Art Nouveau designs, Chinese celadons and tenmoku tea bowls, as well as their own traditions, whose product was at the crossroads between being an industrial export or the aesthetic vision of the individual artist....
CULTURE / Film
Mar 9, 2001

Dirty, rotten, brilliant scoundrel

Woody Allen's films tend to be best when he manages to get beyond himself, which isn't often these days. But if there's one thing Woody loves more than a part in which he lands a younger leading lady, it's jazz. "Sweet and Lowdown," Allen's latest film, is a semifictional paean to guitarist Emmet Ray,...
SOCCER / J. League
Mar 9, 2001

Show me what you've got!

I'd like to greet all the players in the J. League and look forward to seeing the joy of football in Japan this year. I'd specifically like to welcome the new foreign players. My message to you, as well as to the Japanese players, is simply play your best, play football.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 9, 2001

Thais make an enemy out of Myanmar

No one knows who put a bomb on a Thai Airways jet scheduled to carry Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to Chiang Mai, but respected media outlets such as the Matichon newspaper and the Bangkok Post have hinted that the bombing may have something to do with drugs from Myanmar.
EDITORIALS
Mar 7, 2001

Don't throw in the towel on free trade

Japan's towel makers have made a formal request to the government to curb rising textile exports from China and other developing countries. Emergency import restrictions, known as safeguards, are internationally recognized as an exception to the free-trade rules of the World Trade Organization. So far,...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Mar 7, 2001

It ain't easy being green: Irish or just full of blarney?

Each time I grin into the mirror to find a hunk of seaweed wrapped around my teeth, I am reminded of my family background.
LIFE / Digital / SURFERSPUD
Mar 7, 2001

Go ahead, try some

www.tokujo.ac.jp/Tanaka/WWW97/ Hello4/yumie.html This is part of Yumie Harada's home page, the part where she describes her love for natto. And maybe this kind of personal approach is what's needed to get natto virgins past that stench and actually place the stuff in their mouths. Yumie gives the...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Mar 5, 2001

Nanjing Massacre evidence twisted at historian's whim

A publisher asks me to make excerpts from Judge Radhabinod Pal's "dissentient judgment" and write an introduction to the selection. The Indian jurist Pal was one of 11 judges who sat on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (the Tokyo Trial). He found Japan not guilty, the only one to...
JAPAN
Mar 3, 2001

Fujimori must return to face accusers: new Peru envoy

The newly appointed Peruvian ambassador to Japan has urged deposed Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori to return to Lima to answer accusations leveled at him following his decision to resign as president last year from Tokyo.
JAPAN
Mar 3, 2001

Budget passage offers Mori no relief

Normally, a prime minister will breathe a sigh of relief when the annual budget package clears the Lower House. But for Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, the chamber's approval of the 82.65 trillion yen fiscal 2001 budget could mark the beginning of the end for his administration.
JAPAN
Mar 2, 2001

Researcher publishes third study on toilets

OSAKA -- A 53-year-old civil servant in Osaka Prefecture who has been researching the history of toilets in Japan for more than 30 years has published his latest findings in what he calls "The Journal of Toilet Culture."
LIFE / Travel
Feb 28, 2001

Take the path of the pilgrims to mortal happiness

Two types of pilgrim come to Matsuyama in Shikoku's northeasterly Ehime Prefecture: Buddhists and bathers.
LIFE / Travel
Feb 28, 2001

A phoenix from the ashes

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt -- Down by the corniche, a legend of classical antiquity is rising from the ashes as miraculously as a phoenix. This summer, the new $200 million Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a spectacular piece of high-tech architecture billed as the revival of the Ancient Library of Alexandria, is due...
JAPAN
Feb 27, 2001

MMC to cut 9,500 jobs, close Oe plant by 2003

Mitsubishi Motors Corp. said Monday it will cut some 9,500 jobs, or 14 percent of its group workforce, by 2003 and close down its key Oe plant in Nagoya as part of a major restructuring plan.
JAPAN
Feb 27, 2001

MMC to cut 9,500 jobs, close Oe plant by 2003

Mitsubishi Motors Corp. said Monday it will cut some 9,500 jobs, or 14 percent of its group workforce, by 2003 and close down its key Oe plant in Nagoya as part of a major restructuring plan.
CULTURE / Books
Feb 27, 2001

The guide to the Chinese economy

CHINA'S NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY, by Susumu Yabuki and Stephen M. Harner. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999, revised edition, 327 pp., $32. In this thoroughly revised edition of Susumu Yabuki's 1995 book, Stephen Harner (translator of the 1995 book) joins Yabuki to paint a broad picture of China's...
CULTURE / Books
Feb 27, 2001

Fairy tales for modern Japan

GHOST OF A SMILE: Stories, by Deborah Boliver Boehm. Kodansha International, 2000, 288 pp., 2,900 yen (cloth). Imagine Lafcadio Hearn venturing to 21st-century Tokyo reincarnated as a single American woman with a penchant for the exotic and erotic, and you will have a sense of the stories in "Ghost of...
ENVIRONMENT
Feb 26, 2001

The bite of a Jurassic killer

A combination of advanced medical scanning techniques and sophisticated data-analysis used in engineering has revealed the biomechanics of dinosaur feeding.
JAPAN
Feb 25, 2001

Freeze on beltway complicates lives of residents

Shozaburo Kon did not expect to face the ordeal he eventually had to endure when he took the plan of his new house to a local office of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government 10 years ago.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 24, 2001

Nuclear Pakistan and the new Bush team

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Less than three years after Pakistan detonated its first nuclear device, a new Republican administration has taken over in Washington.
CULTURE / Film
Feb 23, 2001

Paradise lost, and regained

For me, "Forrest Gump" was easily one of the most annoying films of the '90s. It waded straight into some of the most turbulent events in recent American history and came back with absolutely nothing to say about them. Given this, it was hard to get excited about the reunion of the "Gump" creative combo,...
ENVIRONMENT
Feb 22, 2001

Fukuoka's waterfront looks west again

FUKUOKA -- Fukuoka Harbor's public foreshores grew again last October with the opening of a new designer outlet and shopping mall, Marinoa City Pier Walk, in the city's west.

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