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EDITORIALS
Jun 18, 1999

Candidates off and running

It was only a matter of time, but it still seems too soon. In the past week, Mr. George W. Bush, the governor of Texas, and Mr. Al Gore, the vice president, officially opened campaigns for the U.S. presidential elections to be held in November next year. The two men are not the only candidates in the...
JAPAN
Jun 17, 1999

Japan to give China $3 million to preserve cultural assets

Japan will provide China between $2.5 million and $3 million in fresh financial assistance to help preserve important cultural assets along the ancient Silk Road, government sources said Thursday.
COMMUNITY
Jun 17, 1999

Trials and triumphs of black beauty

"Black is beautiful" was one of the most culturally charged American political slogans of the 1960s. Thirty years later, former model and educator Barbara Summers proves just how true those words are in her coffee-table book titled "Skin Deep: Inside the World of Black Fashion Models."
JAPAN
Jun 15, 1999

Prewar taste of 'awamori' springs anew

NAHA, Okinawa Pref. — It was almost a religious moment for "awamori" aficionados.
COMMUNITY
Jun 12, 1999

Don't throw in the towel on tenugui yet

Tenugui, rectangular cotton hand towels, are sometimes distributed by shops or firms as gifts for their openings or other occasions, mainly because they are inexpensive, lightweight and easy to carry. Those who receive them, however, are not usually thrilled to get towels printed with simple patterns...
JAPAN
Jun 10, 1999

Teachers to oppose flag, song bill

The Japan Teachers' Union began a three-day regular meeting Thursday in Tokyo's Chiyoda Ward to discuss action plans with a special aim to oppose government moves to legally recognize the Hinomaru as the nation's flag and "Kimigayo" as the anthem.
CULTURE / Music
Jun 10, 1999

Rockers get down for Tibet Freedom weekend

What do an 11th-century Tibetan saint and a member of one of the world's more popular hip-hop groups have in common?
LIFE / Travel
Jun 9, 1999

The business of international adoption

At home in rural Connecticut, with his 3-year-old son Vlad playing beside him, Jim Altman is checking to see how many hits he's gotten on his Web site. Two years after adopting Vlad from a Russian orphanage, Altman is using the Internet to wage a propaganda war against the agency he claims used his money...
COMMUNITY
Jun 3, 1999

Getting to the point of good health

Consider these facts:
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 2, 1999

France's Corsican question

PARIS -- "France," according to one of its best-known poets and political thinkers, Paul Valery, "is the most heterogeneous country that ever existed." The present tragedy in Kosovo makes this sound hyperbolic, yet there is an element of truth in it. The French who live on the shores of the Mediterranean,...
LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA
Jun 2, 1999

But are you experienced?

Remember how online art used to be one of ballyhooed features of our new and improved lives on the Internet? We talked of visiting faraway museums, browsing rarely seen masterpieces, hyper-annotated with curatorial notes and historical contexts. Similarly enticing was the promise of new media and art...
LIFE / Travel / NATURE TRAVEL
Jun 2, 1999

Among the ruins of the Mayan Paris

You wouldn't have wanted to watch a ball game at the close of the season in the ancient Mayan city of Copan.
LIFE / Travel
Jun 2, 1999

Learning through landscapes

ARBORFIELD CROSS, England -- When Susan Humphries was appointed head of the Coombes Infant School in Arborfield Cross, Surrey, an hour's drive from London, it was doubtless a satisfying moment in career terms. A school of her own at last. What she did not realize, and is likely to dismiss modestly today,...
EDITORIALS
Jun 1, 1999

Ratify the stand against torture

It was in 1984 that the United Nations adopted the "Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment." More than 110 countries have since joined the treaty, but surprisingly Japan is not yet one of them. Finally, however, the government has decided to ratify the...
COMMENTARY / World
May 31, 1999

Tiananmen martyrs: rebels without a cause

History holds many surprises for true believers, especially for revolutionaries who find out that the causes they fought for years ago were baseless. That, at least, is the lesson to be drawn from the collapse of the Soviet Union by people who fought and even died for the communist ideology that supported...
JAPAN
May 28, 1999

Lower House panel passes wiretap bills, snubs opposition

The Lower House Judicial Affairs Committee ignored an opposition boycott and approved a package of controversial bills Friday evening that would allow law enforcement authorities to wiretap private communications during investigations into organized crime.
COMMUNITY
May 27, 1999

Tokyo market's quiet riot of color

Beneath cascades of purple orchids, ferns uncoil like emerald snakes. Tokyo's wholesale flower market is a quiet riot of color.
COMMUNITY / How-tos / GETTING THINGS DONE
May 27, 1999

High adventure

Have you decided where you are going to spend New Year's Eve? It should be someplace where you wouldn't mind staying if any of our normal, every day support systems should fail. One unconcerned gentleman has made reservations for a flight over Antarctica. Experts will be on board the 747 to explain about...
COMMUNITY
May 23, 1999

Collector's 1,800 lighters like old flames, not for discard pile

KYOTO -- To the average person, a cigarette lighter is just a 100 yen convenience store item to be tossed in the garbage when the fuel runs out.
JAPAN
May 20, 1999

Chiba considers shorter runway

Chiba Prefecture showed understanding Thursday toward the Transport Ministry's tentative plan to build a shorter runway at Narita airport, an alternative to the second runway stalled by opposition from landowners.
COMMENTARY / World
May 19, 1999

Kosovo refugees need the world's help

Less than four months after the world celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a major human tragedy continues to unfold near the heart of Europe.
LIFE / Travel / NATURE TRAVEL
May 19, 1999

Journeying into the valley of death

"Death Valley," noted our guidebook, "is an inhuman environment: barren and monotonous, burning hot and almost entirely without shade or water." In short, the ideal antidote to Japan's rainy season, which is why we went.
CULTURE / Books
May 18, 1999

Half a biography of Fujimori

THE PRESIDENT WHO DARED TO DREAM: Alberto Fujimori of Peru, by Rei Kimura. Worcester, U.K.: Eyelevel Books, 184 pp., $14.90 (paper). Peru and Japan just celebrated the 100th anniversary of the first Japanese immigrants' arrival in Peru on April 3, 1899. President Alberto Fujimori, himself the son of...
CULTURE / Music / FUZZY LOGIC
May 18, 1999

Holy big beat funk, Captain!

Check him out now, the funky captain. Check him out now, the F-U-N-K-Y captain. Ch-ch-ch-ch-nu-nu-na-na. (cue big drums) . . . . There's a new superhero in town, folks. His name is Captain Funk. He's touching down in a disco den near you. His manifesto is simple:
CULTURE / Books
May 18, 1999

Tracing a profile of the new Japan

REGIME SHIFT: Comparative Dynamics of the Japanese Political Economy, by T.J. Pempel. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998, 263 pp. I'm confused. On the one hand, we're told Japan has undergone tumultuous change since the beginning of the '90s. The Liberal Democratic Party lost its 38-year-long...
CULTURE / Books
May 18, 1999

Progress is fleeting in the fight for sexual equality

THE MOUNTAIN IS MOVING: Japanese Women's Lives, by Patricia Morley. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1999, 240 pp., $39.95 (cloth). The mountain is moving, according to Patricia Morley, but mountains are, by nature, difficult to budge, and this particular one is demonstrating a firm...
EDITORIALS
May 16, 1999

'Star Wars' in their eyes

The lines started forming outside theaters in Hollywood in early April. By last week they had sprouted all over America, despite the fact that with just a few days to go fans can now get advance tickets online or by phone. Tickets for what? What event could possibly be worth waiting in line for six weeks...
ENVIRONMENT
May 16, 1999

Korakuen: a cultivated present from Edo

Koishikawa Korakuen Garden is a well-seasoned piece of greenery. This nearly 370-year-old heirloom of vegetation is at the top of Tokyo's historical hierarchy of parks and gardens. Were it wine it would be vintage; were it a soldier, it would be battle-scarred and covered with war decorations.
CULTURE / Art
May 16, 1999

Doors of modest home open to lessons of the past

Slide open the door to a two-story wooden house in Tokyo's Ota Ward and enter into the life of an ordinary family in the mid-Showa Era, when people lived in homes with mostly tatami rooms, wooden furniture, traditional cooking tools and fetched their water from a well.

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