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JAPAN
Feb 24, 1999

Osaka high court rejects voting rights for minorities

The Osaka High Court on Wednesday upheld a lower court decision rejecting demands by 43 Koreans with permanent resident status that long-term foreign residents be granted the right to vote and run in local elections.
JAPAN
Feb 24, 1999

Pyongyang faces united U.S., Seoul policy: Roth

There is no policy difference between the United States and South Korea in dealing with North Korean underground activities, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Stanley Roth reiterated Wednesday.
EDITORIALS
Feb 23, 1999

Up in arms in Northern Ireland

One sticking point -- if not the key obstacle -- in the Northern Ireland peace process has been the question of when the Irish Republican Army would give up its arms. A fair amount of fudge has been allowed to obscure this issue. That is understandable. After all, no arms would be surrendered until trust...
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 23, 1999

A new bridge over the Pacific revealed

Is friendship between nations possible? Can Japan and the United States be friends as the U.S. is with Canada and Britain, or are they forever destined to have a relationship that turns on a calculation of mutual advantage?
COMMENTARY
Feb 23, 1999

Small weapons, big problems

The major challenge for post-Cold War disarmament negotiations on conventional weapons is to devise ways of controlling machine guns, automatic rifles and other small arms. Those are main weapons used in civil wars in Asia, Africa and Central America. To tackle the challenge, the U.N. Group of Governmental...
COMMUNITY
Feb 23, 1999

Contest lets diplomats flex their Japanese-ness

Heard the one about the foreigner who wanted to get to Nakano and ended up in Nagano? She's actually pretty smart, and has no qualms about telling her embarrassing mishaps to complete strangers -- several hundred of them, in fact.
EDITORIALS
Feb 22, 1999

The Tokyo race is on

After weeks of scheming and squabbling, the cast now appears all set. If the Tokyo gubernatorial election were a soap opera, few people would worry too much about the script, as long as the lineup of stars passed muster. But the choice of a governor for a metropolis with a population of 11 million is...
EDITORIALS
Feb 21, 1999

Architecture for a new millennium

A new building was opened in Berlin last month that has set the architectural world buzzing. If architecture is "frozen music," wrote one observer, citing Friedrich von Schelling's famous dictum, then Berlin's new Jewish Museum is "a truly dissonant piece."
COMMENTARY
Feb 21, 1999

Medicare plan cuts care more than costs

WASHINGTON -- Pension programs in the United States as well as many other countries are heading over the fiscal cliff. Even President Bill Clinton has noticed the problems with Social Security.
COMMUNITY
Feb 21, 1999

Steady Yoyogi belies its myriad past

Aristocrats, farmers, soldiers, pilots, Olympians, crows and bums -- Yoyogi Park has seen them all. From posh feudal abode to farm field, runway to international welcome mat, this park has had a variety of visitors and inhabitants.
COMMUNITY / How-tos / GETTING THINGS DONE
Feb 21, 1999

Sunday afternoon

A reader writes about the Saturday edition of The Japan Times and how much she appreciates the listing of what's going on in our city. She especially enjoyed Robert Yellin's Feb. 13 article about Nezu Museum and its current exhibition revealing the elegance of traditional sake drinking, the sake cups...
COMMUNITY
Feb 21, 1999

Alley offers old fashioned swig and chat

While Tomomi Kahala hopefuls battle their way across Shibuya's Hachiko crossing to the nearest karaoke bar, those looking for a bit of live entertainment and a huge dollop of good-humored banter head straight for a cluster of rickety wooden watering holes that time seems to have forgotten.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Feb 21, 1999

Two-legged enlightenment in land of soccer gods

Let's talk about religion. Soccer, that is. Many Americans don't like soccer because they say there's not enough action. Americans like fast action sports like American football, rugby and ice hockey. Not me. I like soccer because it's slow. I can get up, go to the bathroom, refill my beer and popcorn,...
COMMUNITY
Feb 21, 1999

Frustrated flowers are good news for you

While Yoneko Yoshida, anxiously awaits the arrival of spring, she is also bracing herself for discomfort. As a victim of hay fever, the 62-year-old Tokyo woman suffers from a scratchy throat, itchy, watery eyes and a persistently runny nose for several weeks each year from February till April.
EDITORIALS
Feb 20, 1999

Haunting the high street

As the Internet insinuates itself deeper into daily life, one key facet of its future role -- electronic commerce -- continues its explosive growth. Estimates of the amount of business conducted in cyberspace vary from $30 billion annually to nearly twice that. But one thing is certain: It is increasing...
COMMENTARY
Feb 20, 1999

As Tokyo goes, so goes Japan

Utter chaos reigns in the runup to the Tokyo gubernatorial election, the most important of all local elections to be held in April. The outcome of the preliminary battle is likely to have a great influence on national politics.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 20, 1999

Globalization, the world's whipping boy

For one brief moment less than a decade ago, the idea of "globalization" was viewed with more promise than peril. At the time, it represented an emerging economic reality: the merging of national markets into a single entity that traders and merchants anywhere could access at anytime. This "24-hour,...
CULTURE / Stage
Feb 20, 1999

Tamasaburo romances rough guys

The Kabukiza Theater in Ginza this month is featuring Tamasaburo Bando, one of Japan's foremost onnagata (women's role) actors, in three numbers: first with hislongtime partner Nizaemon Kataoka, then with Kankuro Nakamura. Other great names on the playbill are Danjuro Ichikawa, Kichiemon Nakamura, Tomijuro...
CULTURE / Art
Feb 20, 1999

Exposing the illusion of appearance

Photographer Duane Michals was born into an odd sort of duality in 1932. He was raised in McKeesport, Penn., by devoutly Catholic parents of Czech origin (much like Andy Warhol, whom he would later depict in a series of blurred portraits). Michals' mother, worked as a housekeeper for a rich family, and...
CULTURE / Music
Feb 20, 1999

Kodo beats remixed for a dance groove

In ancient Japan, boundaries between rural villages were not drawn by geography, but by the deep, resonating rhythms of the taiko drum. Kodo, Sado Island's acclaimed taiko troupe, through the preservation, dissemination and study of one of Japan's most internationally celebrated performing arts, has...
EDITORIALS
Feb 19, 1999

The Japan-U.S. performance gap

The U.S. economy has extended its sparkling performance into a ninth year, albeit attended by sentiments of rising caution on Wall Street. The contrast with Japan's decline in the 1990s is so strong that events in the United States look as though they are happening on another planet. In a global era,...
EDITORIALS
Feb 18, 1999

Europe discovers its Kurdish problem

Europe has worked hard to put considerable distance between itself and the Kurds. There have been condemnations of Turkey's violent, repressive policies toward its Kurdish minority, but sensitivities about Ankara's strategic role in European defense and concerns about the reaction of the 1 million Kurds...
EDITORIALS
Feb 17, 1999

The true meaning of the dioxin scare

Nose, a small town on the northern outskirts of Osaka, first put the fear of dioxin into nation's consciousness last year. Now, just 10 months later, another dioxin scare has hit the headlines. This time, the site is Tokorozawa, the Saitama bedroom community on the northwestern outskirts of Tokyo. The...
LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA
Feb 17, 1999

Designing for dollars

Say what you will about Jeff Bezos, president of Amazon.com, but he is a savvy guy. He and his company may not be worth the gazillions of dollars that the market is throwing at them, but he deserves credit for making the market believe in him.
EDITORIALS
Feb 16, 1999

Post-impeachment Clinton

Officially, the impeachment ordeal of U.S. President Bill Clinton is over. Last Friday, the Senate -- in two bipartisan votes -- rejected both charges against the president. By a vote of 55 to 45, they threw out the first article of impeachment that alleged Mr. Clinton committed perjury when testifying...
EDITORIALS
Feb 13, 1999

The victims have rights, too

With all the attention now being focused by the government, police and judicial authorities, educators and the media on Japan's rapidly increasing juvenile crime rate and the escalating level of violence frequently involved, the rights of the victims of crimes in this country have often seemed of secondary...
JAPAN
Feb 12, 1999

Impact of new bond issues must be studied: Miyazawa

The government must consider the impact of newly issued government bonds on the financial market and is currently studying ways to tackle the problem, Finance Minister Kiichi Miyazawa reiterated Friday.
JAPAN
Feb 12, 1999

Narita officer arrested for drugs

An Immigration Office official was arrested earlier this month for possessing illegal drugs, apparently obtained through the Internet, it was learned Friday.
JAPAN
Feb 12, 1999

Kobe budget priority shifts from quake to economy

The city of Kobe announced a 1999 fiscal year budget proposal Friday of just over 2.07 trillion yen, a 2.9 percent increase over the previous year's budget of 2.01 trillion yen.
JAPAN
Feb 12, 1999

War victims unite efforts to win redress from Japan

Representatives of civic groups from Japan, South Korea and the Netherlands signed an agreement Friday to cooperate in seeking compensation from the Japanese government for their sufferings during and after World War II.

Longform

A sinkhole in Yashio, which emerged in January, was triggered by a ruptured, aging sewer pipe. Authorities worry that similar sections of infrastructure across the country are also at risk of corrosion.
That sinking feeling: Japan’s aging sewers are an infrastructure time bomb