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Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Jul 5, 2014

Off the beaten path on Japan's paper trail

At a little roadside store in rural Nagano, a foreign tourist is miming a rice bowl with her cupped left hand. Firm in the belief that Japanese washi (paper — wa meaning Japanese and shi meaning paper) was made from rice, she waves her flattened right hand across the "bowl," miming her desire for "sheets"...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE FOREIGN ELEMENT
Jun 23, 2014

Can Japan show the West how to live peacefully with Islam?

Uniting a colorful mix of expats, removed from the context of sectarian strife and the historical Western interference still haunting many Muslim countries, could the Japanese brand of Islam be a showcase for its peaceful essence?
COMMUNITY / Issues / LAW OF THE LAND
Jun 18, 2014

Still dreaming of a Japan with juries — and without U.S. bases

At 84, Chihiro Isa hopes to see two things in his lifetime: the jury system reinstated in Japan and U.S. forces gone from Okinawa.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jun 18, 2014

Female dramatists dispel gender concern

Last month in Berlin, in a conversation with Annemie Vanackere, artistic director at the city's cutting-edge Hebbel am Ufer company, she was saying how she loved contemporary Japanese theater, and how HAU had worked with several Japanese dramatists. Then she suddenly asked me: "Why were they all men?...
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Jun 14, 2014

Happy endings: foreigners working in Japan's film industry

Film is supposed to be a universal language, but the film business in any given country is usually run by the locals for the locals. The one great exception is Hollywood, which has been making films for the world since the silent days and is open to talent, preferably English speaking, from around the...
Japan Times
WORLD / Crime & Legal
Jun 10, 2014

Five sentenced for slaying of Russian journalist, but mastermind remains unknown

Five men received long prison terms on Monday for the killing of prominent Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya after a trial that failed to reveal who had masterminded the Russian journalist's murder.
Japan Times
WORLD
May 25, 2014

Soccer's crown jewel can't hide Brazil tensions

Brazil, by both area and population, is the fifth-largest nation on Earth. Its economy is perhaps the sixth- or seventh-largest and will soon surpass those of France and Britain. Yet this great state has barely registered its presence globally. In the complex flux of globalized popular culture or the...
Japan Times
BASKETBALL / HOOP SCOOP
May 21, 2014

Nash's strong leadership molds Toyama into title contender

Bob Nash's tenure with the University of Hawaii men's basketball team came to an end in March 2010 after a three-year run as head coach and a 34-56 overall record in that span. For Nash, that opportunity came after a 23-year stint as an assistant coach at the school.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 15, 2014

'Wood Job!'

Shinobu Yaguchi has become a consistent hit maker by following a simple formula: generate laughs from the stumbles and mistakes of heroes learning a new job, art or sport. This formula usually results in audience cheers and tears when triumph finally arrives after many ups and downs. Examples include...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 1, 2014

'Live'

When I was 12 I thought the movie parodies in "Mad" magazine were hilarious. Now I suppose I'm harder to please — or just older — but parodies that self-consciously mock their source, while cutely paying homage to it, quickly put me in a trance.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Apr 26, 2014

Aloha gozaimasu: Japan's influence on Hawaiian culture

In 1868, the first year of the Meiji Era, 148 Japanese men, mainly from the Kanto area, set sail from Yokohama on the British ship Scrito, bound for Honolulu in the Kingdom of Hawaii.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / EVERYMAN EATS
Apr 22, 2014

Japan's freshest ready meals can be found in the basement

If there's one thing all Japanese guidebooks, concierges and expats can agree on, it's that tourists from overseas should make an effort, at some point during their stay, to visit the basement food floors of a major department store.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Apr 1, 2014

LA lifestyle gives starRo a new take on making music

Video-chatting with Los Angeles resident Shinya Mizoguchi toward the tail end of a particularly testing Tokyo winter, it's hard not to feel a twinge of jealousy. I deliberately avoid defaulting to my typically British weather-related opening gambit of small talk, but it's not long before the topic is...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Mar 22, 2014

Born in Japan, made in America

Although born in Japan, Mariko Nagai, author of the just-published novel-in-verse "Dust of Eden," was raised mostly in Belgium and the United States.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / VIEWS FROM THE STREET
Mar 3, 2014

Tokyo: What's the story behind your tattoo?

Some foreign residents spill the stories behind their ink.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 27, 2014

'Oh Boy'

They say that the EU in its current state of capitalism is a mirror of America in the 1990s. (Remember what that was like? It wasn't all bad, really.) This certainly applies to the Berlin-set micro universe of "Oh Boy," whose very title smells like teen spirit — but it's actually set in the present...
SOCCER / J. League / 2014 J. LEAGUE PREVIEW
Feb 27, 2014

Gamba looking for payback

The following is the first of a two-part preview for the upcoming J. League season. Team-by-team previews of the nine lowest-ranked teams competing in the first division are listed.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Feb 15, 2014

Dazaifu dalliance reveals curious case of a plum-struck deity

It's all thanks to the Spanish ambassador, really. Angeles and I were at the Spanish Consulate in Fukuoka, Kyushu's biggest city, to pick up her new passport. By midday, we'd done the business, slurped our way through the obligatory bowl of Hakata ramen, and were looking for a way to fill a few hours...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Feb 8, 2014

NHK drama takes a wild stab at a dying art

The hero of 'Uzumasa Limelight' has made his living for half a century as a kirare-yaku in sword-fighting movies. Kirare-yaku have a specific role: Their job is to die on screen.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Feb 3, 2014

Uphold basic living standards

To attain a national minimum for social welfare, some urge introducing a basic income — provision of a fixed sum of money to each citizen — to replace social security, which covers only needy people.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jan 25, 2014

Age brings no respite from hard times for the 'lost generation'

Poverty is a relative term. As with age, you're as poor as you feel. Affluence brings with it rising expectations. Failure to meet them feeds the psychology, if not the dire physical deprivation, of poverty.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 23, 2014

'Chiisai Ouchi (The Little House)'

Several veterans of Japan's old studio system are still working, but Yoji Yamada is the only one still directing for the studio he started out with, back in 1954. He has directed 81 films for Shochiku; his extraordinary box-office success with the "Tora-san" series, 48 films from 1969 to 1995 about the...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jan 22, 2014

The Onodera enigma

The name of the late great Pina Bausch's acclaimed Tanztheater in the German city of Wuppertal may translate as "Dancetheater," but its works often owe more to abstract emotional action and snatched dialogue than to dance. Over in London, meanwhile, Simon McBurney's Complicite company has long been at...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books / ESSENTIAL READING FOR JAPANOPHILES
Jan 11, 2014

Kitchen

When "Kitchen," the debut novel by Banana Yoshimoto, was first released in Japan in 1988, it caused such a stir that the media frenzy around her was dubbed "Bananamania."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jan 8, 2014

New York's Apples make a big impression

In the last three months since I arrived in New York to study American drama with a grant from the Asian Cultural Council, a U.S. nonprofit dedicated to international cultural exchange, I have been to the theater more than 70 times — including at least a dozen visits to somewhere that's been a truly...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / FOREIGN AGENDA
Dec 25, 2013

Tokyo, the city that's not as crazy as everyone thinks

As a Japanese friend of mine who has lived all over Japan once said, 'People from the Kansai area are like Latin people, but in Tokyo they're more like Germans.
WORLD
Dec 6, 2013

Nelson Mandela, ex-president of South Africa, dead at 95

Nelson Mandela, the former political prisoner who became the first president of a post-apartheid South Africa and whose heroic life and towering moral stature made him one of history's most influential statesmen, died Dec. 5, the government announced. He was 95.
Japan Times
ASIA PACIFIC
Dec 1, 2013

Who is Xi? Chinese leader enigma to world

In early November, China's most powerful man, Xi Jinping, stepped into a rustic farmhouse while on an inspection tour in far-flung Hunan province. The occupants' sole electrical appliance, a fluorescent light bulb, burned overhead. Shi Pazhuan, the family matriarch, was confused. "What should I call...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Nov 30, 2013

The Aesthetics of Strangeness: Eccentricity and Madness in Early Modern Japan

Misfits. Oddballs. Bohemians. In Tokugawa Japan? Yes indeed, a veritable plethora of them. The Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1867) was hardly the first repressive regime, or the last, to throw nonconformity out the front door only to find it creeping in through the back door, through the window, through cracks...

Longform

Rock group The Yellow Monkey played K-Arena Yokohama in June as part of a nationwide tour. Concerts are increasingly popular in the age of social media as users value in-person experiences.
Inside Japan’s arena boom: Sports, sound and city-building