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JAPAN
Jul 5, 2000

Watanuki appointed Lower House speaker

Tamisuke Watanuki, former secretary general of the Liberal Democratic Party, was elected speaker of the House of Representatives on Tuesday.
JAPAN
Jul 5, 2000

Blue Impulse planes missing

Two planes of the Air Self-Defense Force Blue Impulse acrobatic flight team went missing with three crew members aboard Tuesday morning over the sea off Miyagi Prefecture, ASDF officials said.
JAPAN
Jul 5, 2000

Average age of Cabinet is highest since 1990

The average age of the Cabinet launched Tuesday by Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori is 66.05, the highest in 10 years.
JAPAN
Jul 5, 2000

Mori selects new Cabinet

Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori inaugurated his new Cabinet, which maintained the basic structure of his old one, on Tuesday night after being re-elected to the nation's top government post in the Diet earlier in the day.
JAPAN
Jul 5, 2000

Snow lied after milk-poisoning case

OSAKA -- Officials of Snow Brand Milk Products Co. on Tuesday said that a valve at an Osaka production facility found to be contaminated with a toxin-causing bacteria was used almost every day, and not rarely as it had claimed Saturday.
BUSINESS
Jul 5, 2000

Hotel bankruptcies hit postbubble high

The number of bankruptcies of inns and hotels rose 8.4 percent in fiscal 1999 from the previous year to 90, the worst figure since the burst of the late 1980s bubble economy, a private credit research institution said Tuesday.
JAPAN
Jul 5, 2000

Newly appointed ministers announce policy priorities

The ministers appointed to the second Cabinet of Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori announced their priority tasks in separate press conferences Tuesday evening.
BUSINESS
Jul 5, 2000

Upbeat 'tankan' may lead to rate hike

Business sentiment among the nation's corporations improved over the past three months, underscoring a recent recovery trend, according to the Bank of Japan's "tankan" business sentiment survey for June.
BUSINESS
Jul 5, 2000

Japan Telecom may go local

Japan Telecom Co. is considering entering the local telephone business as early as next year in major cities such as Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, with rates lower than those offered by its rivals, it was learned Tuesday.
JAPAN
Jul 5, 2000

Projectile fired at base found

Police said Tuesday morning they found one of two projectiles fired Monday night at Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo in what they believe was an attack by radicals opposed to the presence of the U.S. military in Japan.
LIFE / Travel
Jul 5, 2000

Japanese researcher chips away at an ancient mystery

PHONSAVAN, Laos -- Archaeologist Eiji Nitta dug and scraped. The answer to the puzzle of the giant stone vessels scattered throughout the Plain of Jars in northern Laos lay, he believed, not in their material or their contents, but in what lay under them.
LIFE / Travel
Jul 5, 2000

The Plain of Jars: A place of war and death

PHONSAVAN, Laos -- It should be hard to go missing on the Plain of Jars. But hundreds have.
BUSINESS
Jul 5, 2000

Japan to resume yen loans to Colombia

After nearly five years of suspension, Japan will resume official yen loans to Colombia to help the Latin American country rebuild its shattered economy, government sources said Tuesday.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Jul 5, 2000

Mind reading, or am I just predictable?

It is often said that long-time married couples grow so close they can actually read each other's minds, but either that's hooey or my wife and I are out of synch, ESP-wise.
LIFE / Travel / NATURE TRAVEL
Jul 5, 2000

Species hidden in the mist of Tikal

TIKAL, Guatemala -- Early morning, and thin mist licks around the feet of Tikal's towering Mayan temples. It is that haunted time, not quite light, not quite dark, when one feels that the odds of seeing a jaguar padding golden-eyed through the ruins are at their highest.
LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA
Jul 5, 2000

The tyranny of the square

When talking to Ted Nelson, strap in tight. It's quite a ride. Trained as a philosopher and film director, he is equal parts visionary and crank. Many consider him to be one of the fathers of the World Wide Web. He coined the word "hypertext" in 1965, but he has become a scathing critic of the Web and...
LIFE / Travel
Jul 5, 2000

Get back to the garden, the perfect summer oasis

There's a reggae-loving bar owner in Fukuoka who loathes the stereotype that reggae is "summer music." Truth is, though, his business does extremely well during summer. It seems that atmosphere-building is still an essential part of the seasons in Japan.
COMMENTARY
Jul 5, 2000

Advancing smartly backward

LONDON -- It is an old American saying that "the pioneer is the one who gets the arrow in his back." So when President Jacques Chirac of France recently proposed a "pioneering" project to bring France and Germany still closer together at the political level and, as he put it, to "move further and faster...
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Jul 5, 2000

Migrants and vagrants under Teuri's crags

An hour and a half west of the small harbor town of Haboro, which is just three hours north of Sapporo, lie two small islands: Teuri and Yagishiri. Teuri is easy to visit and has fascinating seabird colonies and good walking. There is a ferry from Haboro, which goes via Yagishiri, and although there...
COMMUNITY / How-tos / GETTING THINGS DONE
Jul 5, 2000

Sometimes too late

Several readers have asked me to repeat my favorite column. That is quite difficult. Actually, there would be two but neither was ever written. There are many questions that are never selected to be in a column.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 5, 2000

A Japan-U.S. alliance for an altered world

The world is still trying to grasp the meaning of the summit between the two Koreas. Many are euphoric; wiser heads counsel that there is a long way to go before there's real peace on the Korean Peninsula. Nonetheless, if reconciliation and, eventually, unification do come about, the effects will be...
EDITORIALS
Jul 4, 2000

A step toward financial stability

The Financial Agency, which was launched Saturday in a major move to integrate the operating and planning roles of financial policymaking bodies, started actual operations on Monday. The new financial-watchdog body combines the Financial Supervisory Agency and the Finance Ministry's Financial Planning...
JAPAN
Jul 4, 2000

Whale and dolphin meat sold in Japan has high levels of dioxin

Japanese researchers have found high concentrations of accumulated dioxin in whale and dolphin meat sold in Japan, according to a report submitted to an international whaling meeting that opened Monday in Adelaide, Australia.
JAPAN
Jul 4, 2000

Clinic uses donor sperm to lead way for sterile seed

A Tokyo clinic has developed a groundbreaking in vitro fertilization procedure in which sperm from a third person is used to activate a sterile husband's sperm during fertilization, according to the head of the clinic.
SOCCER / World cup
Jul 4, 2000

Japanese, Koreans study cohosting at Euro 2000

ROTTERDAM, Netherlands -- Senior officials from both the Japanese and Korean World Cup organizing committees said Saturday they expected to learn many things from the cohosted Euro 2000 Soccer Championship, but emphasized that the 2002 World Cup was a different kettle of fish with its own attendant problems....
JAPAN
Jul 4, 2000

Toll from contaminated milk passes 7,000

OSAKA -- Over 7,000 people had been affected by food poisoning as of Monday after drinking low-fat milk marketed by Snow Brand Milk Products Co., while only 15 percent of the milk subject to recall had been retrieved.
JAPAN
Jul 4, 2000

Governors salaries fall

The incomes of 16 prefectural governors and 5 mayors of large cities fell in 1999 from a year earlier due to government financial problems and scandal-related salary and bonus cuts, according to income declarations released Monday.
JAPAN
Jul 4, 2000

Mori and advisers make last-minute Cabinet decisions

Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori continued consulting top Liberal Democratic Party officials Monday evening as he tried to finalize the lineup of his new Cabinet, to be launched today.
BUSINESS
Jul 4, 2000

Domestic vehicle sales mark 2% first-half rise

Domestic sales of new cars, trucks and buses in the first half of 2000 increased 2 percent from the same period last year to 2,113,357 vehicles, the first year-on-year rise in three years, an industry association said Monday.

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