Search - life

 
 
Japan Times
LIFE
Dec 11, 2011

The Scot who shaped Japan

This coming Friday, Dec. 16, 2011, marks the centenary of the death in his opulent home in the Shiba Park area of Tokyo's central Azabu district of the Scottish-born trader Thomas Blake Glover, who became the first foreigner ever decorated by the Japanese government when he was awarded the Order of the...
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
Nov 20, 2011

Paradoxes pervade gender issues' public face in Japan

Transgender people are popping up everywhere in the current Japanese media landscape. Whether it's appearing on variety shows or hawking soft drinks or makeup in TV ads, the current crop of "new-half" celebrities have established themselves in the mainstream in a way that has surprised many onlookers....
COMMENTARY
Nov 16, 2011

Who in America gets to judge political truth?

The Stolen Valor Act of 2005, a compound of political pandering and moral exhibitionism, was whooped through the Senate, aka the "world's greatest deliberative body," by unanimous consent; the House, joining the stampede, passed it by a voice vote.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Oct 2, 2011

Meticulous ode to love and fate

It is rather disconcerting to read a novel that opens with the assertion that "I've already slid right on past the big five-oh — a milestone no one thinks is very pretty and few are eager to reach — to become a man of fifty-one," particularly when this reviewer reaches that milestone this coming...
JAPAN / History
Aug 14, 2011

Film mines rich seams of history

Hiroko Kumagai will never forget the day in 1998 when she first stepped inside the red-brick building at the entrance to the closed and shuttered Miyahara shaft in the Miike coal mine in Omuta, Fukuoka Prefecture.
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Aug 14, 2011

Media coverage often 'the last push' to suicide

In May, 24-year-old TV personality Miyu Uehara was pronounced dead shortly after a friend found her hanging from a door in her Tokyo apartment. Uehara's death was called an "apparent suicide" by the media, and while the terminology was cautious the reporting itself took for granted the belief that Uehara...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jul 7, 2011

Ming Wong re-casts classics to reveal our roles in modern society

Brightly colored billboards, draped curtains and theater seats have transformed the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo, into a cinematic space. But there are no feature films being screened here — this is Singaporean artist Ming Wong's first solo show in Japan.
Reader Mail
Jun 12, 2011

A checkup can tell only so much

Regarding the June 5 editorial, "Japanese life index": Japanese people need to find their own healthy lifestyle to achieve a measure of happiness. Additional items from the latest "Your Better Life Index," prepared by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, records Japan's life expectancy...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Apr 29, 2011

Divides in the Pure Land

The portrait of Honen Shoin (13th century) is known in Japanese as "Kagami no Miei" (mirror portrait) and shows the famous Buddhist priest seated on a mat, slightly slumped and holding his nenju (rosary). For the title of another famous 13th-century depiction of a well-known Buddhist priest, Shinran,...
JAPAN
Mar 29, 2011

Season of special poignancy

The cherry trees will soon blossom in Japan.
COMMENTARY
Mar 25, 2011

India's Supreme Court allows euthanasia

CHENNAI, India — India's Supreme Court ruled March 14 that an Indian citizen has the right to die with dignity. There are understandable riders to this landmark judgment that said thousands of people leading a vegetative life could have their artificial support systems withdrawn and thus end their...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Mar 19, 2011

Poetess achieves duality of words, numbers

Statistically, there's no accounting for Jessica Goodfellow's life in Japan. The daughter of an engineer, on a fast track in her early 20s to a Ph.D. in economics at California Institute of Technology, Goodfellow realized something essential didn't correlate: her incalculable love of poetry.
COMMUNITY
Mar 10, 2011

Achieving happiness and well-being through positive psychology

Positive psychology is a hot topic these days. Books with "happiness" in the title are pouring out of publishers' lists, and studies on resilience, well-being and gratitude have made their way from academic journals to mainstream magazines. More than 200 colleges and universities in the United States,...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Feb 26, 2011

Committed to 'making it work' as foreign wife

Forty-five years spent living in the Kobe area as the American wife of a Japanese businessman must change a person. Yet Winnie Inui, 68, still welcomes visitors to her suburban home in Ashiya, Hyodo Prefecture, with a blanket of felicitous concern ("Enough tea, dear?") and a flair for storytelling that...
COMMUNITY
Feb 12, 2011

For Kanagawa artist, past goods offer key to creation

View the sun through a shitajiki, those transparent, decorative pencil-boards ubiquitous to elementary school children in Japan, and you can gaze, squint-free, into its rays. The world transforms when you look directly at the sun because perceptions shift. Shoichi Sakurai, 49, artist, discovered this...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 17, 2010

'Afterwards'

You can take the boy out of France but you can't take France . . . You know how it goes. In "Afterwards," French heartthrob Romain Duris ("The Beat that My Heart Skipped") plays workaholic Manhattan attorney Nathan, and though this should be a celebratory vehicle that marks his jump across the Atlantic...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / HAVE YOUR SAY
Aug 10, 2010

Of Charisma Men and Western Women

Last month, The Japan Times invited readers to send in their thoughts on "Charisma Man," originally a comic strip that ran from 1998 in The Alien, a Nagoya-based magazine, but lately something of a byword for the stereotypical nerdy Western guy with the beautiful Japanese girlfriend.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 23, 2010

'Seraphine'

When a woman values her art over personal happiness, the result can yield sheer, mesmerizing beauty. Tolstoy wrote that women prevail because of their "ingrained talent" to achieve happiness, but at the same time this talent becomes their downfall in achieving true greatness. Indeed, had Frida Kahlo,...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jul 3, 2010

Witnessing over a century of history

When alone, Hedwig Koh's eyes gaze perpetually into the past. Even as a child, she looked off into the distance: "I spent most of my childhood upstairs at the attic window, looking out at the view, imagining far away places."
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WORDS TO LIVE BY
Jun 10, 2010

Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani

Toru Iwatani, 55, is the designer of Pac-Man, the classic video game that virtually kick-started the world market for the video-gaming industry. Released by Namco in Tokyo on May 22, 1980, Pac-Man made history as the first video game that appealed to both genders and to all age groups. Idea-man Iwatani,...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHO'S WHO
May 25, 2010

Expat dancer Hibari Misora-inspired

Chris Chavez maintains an upbeat outlook about life in Japan but leaves the rosy-tinted view for idealists or those newly arrived. This Mexican-American's snapping brown eyes differentiate clearly the good, bad and indifferent of living as a foreign woman in Tokyo.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Apr 27, 2010

Battered Briton survives aikido ordeal

At the end of February, a group of international students graduated from the Tokyo-based Yoshinkan Honbu Dojo, one of the most intensive martial arts training centers in the world.
BUSINESS / JAPANESE PERSPECTIVES
Mar 1, 2010

Message for Hatoyama from his patron saint

Saint Thomas More is the patron saint of politicians. As a Catholic myself I should have known this before, but the information actually came to me quite recently via the Mainichi Shimbun. So many thanks to the newspaper for this piece of religious education.
CULTURE / Books
Feb 21, 2010

Truly unique version of the foreigner's tale

Like a Yemenese bride-to-be who first sees the countenance of her fiance in a photo presented by relatives, Rebecca Otowa experienced a presentiment of her future in a black-and-white image of a building, a 350-year-old farmhouse in rural Japan.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHO'S WHO
Feb 9, 2010

'Otaku' turns passion for collecting into gold mine

Danny Choo, a Tokyo-based computer programmer and entrepreneur, calls himself a full-time "otaku."
Japan Times
LIFE
Jan 10, 2010

First Snow

"Tamaki-kun! It's you, isn't it?" Startled, the man looked up from the book he'd been perusing. He stared at the woman in bewilderment. "Yes, my name is Tamaki . . . "
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Nov 20, 2009

'2012' star tells of being John Cusack

HOLLYWOOD — The year 2012, according to the ancient Mayas, is the year Earth destructs and a new cycle of life begins. (The Aztec and other pre-Columbian American calendars also held a cyclical view of the universe, sort of a reincarnation of planets at the end of each eon). So leave it to Hollywood...
LIFE
Oct 25, 2009

Bodhisattva of the river road

"Have another drink, Boss!"
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Sep 20, 2009

Now suicide has become a political issue, how will Japan address it?

Without a doubt the grimmest statistic coming out of Japan today concerns the number of suicides, which have exceeded 30,000 annually for 11 years in a row — engendering indescribable tragedies for so many families.

Longform

Dangami House is a 180-year-old former samurai residence of the Kato clan, who ruled over Ozu, Ehime Prefecture, until the Meiji Restoration.
A house, a legacy and the quiet work of restoration in rural Japan