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EDITORIALS
Jul 11, 2002

Africa asks, what's in a name?

After nearly four decades, the Organization of African Unity is no more. The OAU, founded in 1963, was dissolved this week. It was reborn as the African Union with the same membership and the same ambitions. Fortunately, there is one big difference between the new organization and the old one: The AU...
ENVIRONMENT / OUR PLANET EARTH
Jul 11, 2002

Diving and biking to eco-awareness

Excuse me for a moment if I boast, but I am delighted with the progress my backyard is making in its quest for biological diversity. No doubt my neighbors view my garden as unruly and overgrown, but as it's no bigger than a parking space, I let it have its way.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Jul 11, 2002

Knowing the silent sense of self

At birth, an infant has only the sketchiest notion of its own body. Only from moving its arms and legs and sensing the effects on skin, muscle and joints does a baby learn what belongs to itself and what to the external world. By the age of 9, a child's body image is more sophisticated, consisting of...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 10, 2002

Asian trainees keep Kawaguchi's furnaces blasting

After a hard day's work at a blast furnace in Kawaguchi, Saitama Prefecture, Vietnamese trainees cheered as they watched a recent World Cup soccer match on TV.
COMMENTARY / JAPAN IN THE GLOBAL ERA
Jul 8, 2002

Great country; pity about the institutions

LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- My good friend Philippe Pons, the Japan correspondent for the leading French daily Le Monde, wrote an excellent article, "Au Japon, la crise n'est pas ce que l'on croit" (In Japan, the crisis is not what people think), for the newspaper's June 19 edition. Pons rectifies many...
COMMENTARY
Jul 7, 2002

Morality to match the times

LONDON -- What is it about the British and sex? Young people seem to leap to it as though having as much of it, as soon as possible, as flamboyantly and boastfully as possible and damn the consequences, is their national destiny.
BASEBALL / MLB
Jul 6, 2002

Passing of 'Pancho' a loss for baseball

Our good friend, Kazuo 'Pancho' Ito, one of the most colorful characters on the international baseball scene over the past 40 years, died in Tokyo on July 4 after a long illness. He was 68.
SOCCER / World cup
Jul 5, 2002

Zico open to taking Japan job

Former Brazil international and Kashima Antlers technical director Zico is very receptive to the Japan Football Association's offer to become the next Japan national team coach, saying he "would like to take it if the two sides can settle the matter in details."
COMMENTARY
Jul 5, 2002

No reason to bury 'sunshine'

LOS ANGELES -- Last Saturday's fierce 21-minute naval gun battle between the two Koreas was unfortunate and tragic for several reasons -- not just for the loss of lives on both sides. The deadly duel splashed cold water on South Korea's sudden place in the sun. Its soccer team had just completed its...
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Jul 5, 2002

Our yankii are different from your yankees

You know you're old when the slang expressions so fashionable in your youth go right over the heads of 22-year-olds who stare blankly as though you've just spoken to them in ancient Egyptian. One remembers a time when mecchanko (extremely superduper) was the adjective of the day, used to describe everything...
LIFE / Digital
Jul 4, 2002

The Simpsons on DVD -- hi-fi Americana

Fox Home Video has just released "The Simpsons Season Two DVD Collection." If you have not heard of the Simpsons, you have a little catching up to do.
LIFE / Digital / NAME OF THE GAME
Jul 4, 2002

Summertime fun to seek, avoid

It's been more than a year since Nintendo released Game Boy Advance -- a much, much more powerful Game Boy with a bigger, color screen and several times more processing power.
JAPAN
Jul 3, 2002

Kim invites Emperor to South Korea

South Korean President Kim Dae Jung on Tuesday invited Emperor Akihito to visit South Korea.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 3, 2002

Program empowers disabled Asians

Lokesh Khadka, a 23-year-old deaf Nepalese, is determined to change the society of his home country so that it will accept people with hearing disabilities.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music / J-POPSICLE
Jul 3, 2002

Make way for the gloom

Mr. Hyde is waiting to be interviewed in the chicly decrepit confines of Casa del Japon, a Western-style house in Azabu that was the residence of China's ambassador to Japan before World War II and is now a bar and restaurant.
COMMENTARY
Jul 1, 2002

Carbon tax is long past due

The global environment is deteriorating. I saw this firsthand on my trip to China several years ago. The plane arrived a few hours behind schedule because of blowing dust. As I disembarked, I noticed the jetliner was covered with black particles of "yellow sand."
JAPAN
Jul 1, 2002

Hiddink invited to dine with leaders

Guus Hiddink, coach of South Korea's national soccer team, has been invited to a dinner party that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will host for President Kim Dae Jung on Monday, a South Korean government source said Sunday.
EDITORIALS
Jun 30, 2002

'An honorable man'

There is a professor at New York's Vassar College who clearly knows his Shakespeare, perhaps not as well as he thought he did until a week or so ago, but at least well enough to recall Touchstone's advice in "As You Like It": "Let us make an honorable retreat, though not with bag and baggage, yet with...
LIFE / Food & Drink
Jun 30, 2002

Ramen reborn as noodles nouveaux

Could ramen, Japan's answer to the greasy spoon, go gourmet? It started out simple -- this dish of Chinese-style noodles in soup was conjured up by cooks in Yokohama's Chinatown in the 1920s. Its present association with drab 24-hour diners and poor nutrition gives it a low rank in the food hierarchy:...
COMMENTARY
Jun 29, 2002

A dangerous new doctrine

LONDON -- "I will not wait on events while dangers gather." Thus speaks U.S. President George W. Bush -- and in doing so appears to state, in plain and simple language, a revolutionary new doctrine that upends five decades of thinking about global security.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jun 29, 2002

Cheering on Special Olympics, seeking volunteers

It is confusing to discover that Kayako Hosokawa has three offices in a building in Tokyo's Kasumigaseki. Two are neighbors -- "so convenient," she observes, nipping to and fro. The other is on the fifth floor, below. It is even more confusing to learn she has a fourth office, in Kumamoto, close to the...
EDITORIALS
Jun 28, 2002

Peace without Mr. Arafat

U.S. President George W. Bush has finally laid out his vision of Middle East peace, and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat does not seem to have a place in it. That is one of the few details in Mr. Bush's speech, which is long on "vision" and short on specifics. The call for a new Palestinian leadership...
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 25, 2002

Nuclear taboo remains strong

Recent comments by leading Japanese politicians have raised international concern about Tokyo's nuclear intentions. Those fears are misplaced: Japan's nuclear taboo remains as powerful as ever. The comments do signal growing frustration within Japan's policy community over the need for a long-delayed...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / NATURE TRAVEL
Jun 25, 2002

The monks and the markets of Mandalay

The Ayeryarwady flows smooth as oil, dark as coffee, wide but shallow, with occasional ripples and tucks where the sandbars nudge the surface. There is none of the hectic frenzy of river traffic that smothers many of Asia's great waterways in fumes and oil slicks -- Myanmar moves to a different rhythm,...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Jun 24, 2002

U.S. lessons Japan may prefer to skip

NEW YORK -- Americans love to learn and teach lessons. The Japanese love to seek and accept them.
COMMENTARY
Jun 24, 2002

Lawyers see gold in tooth-filling lawsuits

WASHINGTON -- The American judicial system abounds with scare stories and strike suits. Leave it to the trial lawyers to blame almost every human ailment on someone with a deep pocket. The latest cause celebre is tooth fillings.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 24, 2002

Breeze of de-escalation blows in Kashmir

MADRAS, India -- Maybe the world is breathing easier now. There will probably not be a nuclear conflict between the two long warring Asian rivals, India and Pakistan. There are distinct signs of de-escalation between their armies, which have stood in a defiant eye-to-eye confrontation for several months....

Longform

Tetsuzo Shiraishi, speaking at The Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage, uses a thermos to explain how he experienced the U.S. firebombing of March 1945, when he was just 7 years old.
From ashes to high-rises: A survivor’s account of Tokyo’s postwar past