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Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 9, 2014

Fukada's young castaways on adulthood's shores

Born in Tokyo in 1980, Koji Fukada released his first film in 2004, but his breakthrough was 2010's "Kantai (Hospitalité)," a witty black comedy about a mysterious stranger who talks his way into a job at a small Tokyo printing shop and is soon insinuating himself into the lives of the shop's proprietor...
CULTURE / Film
Jan 9, 2014

'Escape Plan'

Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks? Well, anyone who's seen a Sylvester Stallone movie lately. Stallone, even as he enters retirement age, is determined to hang onto his action-movie star status, and to his credit, he still comes equipped with biceps capable of busting someone's spine.
Japan Times
Events / Events In Tokyo
Jan 9, 2014

Taste some local fun at Tokyo Dome

Whenever you crave a home-made meal, chances are you'll head straight to your hometown or mom's house for a taste of your childhood. Failing that, though, you could visit the Furusato Matsuri at Tokyo Dome City in Tokyo's Suidobashi district, where all kinds of local foods and specialties from across...
Japan Times
Events / Events In Tokyo
Jan 9, 2014

Winter could be the best season to visit the zoo

Winter is not the season most people would think of as a good time to visit the zoo, but it is actually one of the most eventful times of the year for many animals as they adapt to the colder temperatures. See for yourself this month as the Tokyo Zoological Park Society kicks off its Visit Hot Zoo 2014...
Reader Mail
Jan 8, 2014

Discovering the Okinawan dialect

For the past year I've been researching, as a school project, the decline of the Shimakutuba dialect spoken in Okinawa. We even went on a trip to Okinawa for three nights and four days; one night was spent in home stays with host families.
Reader Mail
Jan 8, 2014

A simple remedy for inequality

There recently has been debate on this page about whether economics is a science or not. It looked ridiculous to me, since every economist bases his or her economic theory on personal beliefs about humanity and society, and often on unrealistic hypotheses, none of which can be proved scientifically....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 8, 2014

Shimomura Kanzan kept nihonga clean and cool

Art can sometimes play a balancing or compensatory role in society, giving voice to neglected or superseded aspects of a culture. For example, the neo-feudalist ethos of Pre-Raphaelitism and the pastoralism of Impressionism developed against a backdrop of increasing urbanization and materialism. This...
Reader Mail
Jan 8, 2014

Rub out anti-tattoo policy

Regarding the Dec. 31 Kyodo article "Tokyo bathhouses look to tap foreigners but ensure they behave": If Japanese onsen owners wish for more foreigners to visit and enjoy their facilities, they may need to revisit their "no tattoos" policy.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 7, 2014

Time to relegate 'moral laws' to history's dustbin

Nothing lasts forever — especially in the U.S. with its 50 percent divorce rate — and it's clear that same-sex marriage will eventually be the law of the land.
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Jan 7, 2014

Bar for pre-crisis bankers falls on hard times

Heartland, the bar in Tokyo's Roppongi Hills complex where bankers from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. partied before the 2008 financial crisis, has shut its doors after more than a decade.
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / ON: DESIGN
Jan 6, 2014

New furnishing for the home, plus the latest from Postalco

Postalco keeps your money safe
EDITORIALS
Jan 6, 2014

No substitute for overseas travel

Whatever the reasons are for why younger Japanese aren't traveling overseas as much as the older generations, travel can be the best way for people to learn of different cultures and stem the tendency to show bias against people of different ethnic or cultural backgrounds.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 6, 2014

How South Korea rides out emerging-markets turmoil

With seven of every 10 high school graduates attending a university, there is a surplus of educated people in South Korea. Estimates are that 40 percent of college graduates are redundant.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 6, 2014

NSA-less costs of making life safe

Aren't there other ways of spending tens of billions of dollars that would save more lives than America's National Security Agency is credited with saving each year
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 6, 2014

India's sex laws contradict tradition of tolerance

It is surprising that India's Bharatiya Janata Party would privilege the social morality of Victorian England above both precolonial indigenous social practices and the constitutional morality of independent India.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / JUST BE CAUSE
Jan 6, 2014

The empire strikes back: the top issues for non-Japanese in 2013

2013 saw the enfranchised elite consolidating their power further than has ever been seen in the postwar era, while Japan's disenfranchised peoples slipped ever lower down the totem pole, becoming targets of suspicion, fear and loathing.
Japan Times
JAPAN / GENERATIONAL CHANGE
Jan 5, 2014

Rebuilding hope, one stitch at a time

Most of the 19 women from the tsunami-hit city of Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, who work for Tamako Mitarai's knitwear company had no professional experience as knitters.
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Jan 5, 2014

Chinese gaming mecca attempts to shed its gaudy image

Walk into a casino in China's gambling mecca of Macau, and the first thing that strikes you is the silence. There's no blaring music, no sharp cries of victory; all you hear is the rustle of clothing, a hushed conversation, the occasional thump on a table — subtle signs of fortunes being made and lost....
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design
Jan 4, 2014

Kenya Hara: the future of design

Sitting at a plain white table in a meeting room high up on the 12th floor of a narrow building in central Tokyo, product designer Kenya Hara asks me to picture a shallow plate in my mind. "Now imagine a slightly deeper plate," Hara says, "that gets deeper and deeper and eventually becomes a bowl."
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Jan 4, 2014

Kitsuki's double visions of delight

The guesthouse I was staying at in Kitsuki was named after the owner, a tough but warm-hearted example of Kyushu womanhood, someone who had learnt to stand her own ground on an island known for its almost theatrical levels of machismo.

Longform

Koichi Tagawa’s diary entry from Aug. 9, 1945, describes the day of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
The horrors of Nagasaki, in first person