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CULTURE / Books
Jun 16, 2013

Historical biography captures the spirit of early feminist Japan

Time distorts, concealing the individual drops of humanity within the great tide of history. "Beauty in Disarray" attempts to reveal one such individual threatened to be lost in time, a woman named Noe Ito. In telling Ito's tragic story, biographer Harumi Setouchi (now known by her Buddhist name Jakucho)...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jun 16, 2013

Writers' elegant letters to each other suffer from lack of venom and indiscretion

The demise of letter writing is the cause of widespread lament.
Reader Mail
Jun 16, 2013

Condition of the Crown Princess

The June 11 Kyodo story "Crown Prince marks two decades of marriage, happy wife is on the mend" continues the parade of euphemisms about the Crown Princess and the Imperial Household Agency.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jun 16, 2013

Jimbo's memoir mirrors his alpha-male tennis career

Like most great tennis players of the million-dollar era, the career of Jimmy Connors began prenatally. As with Andy Murray, his Grand Slam gene was passed down the maternal line.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 15, 2013

Is U.S. still the land of the free?

It is not the United Stasi of America. Nevertheless, one still ought to ask how far one can trust the security and law-enforcement complexes to police themselves.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Crime & Legal
Jun 14, 2013

Parolee in 1963 Saitama girl's slaying hits authorities for lying, forcing confessions

Investigators will lie, grill for hours on end and withhold exonerating evidence — in effect do anything — to extract a confession from a suspect they have pegged for a crime, a 1994 parolee seeking a retrial to clear his name in the 1963 kidnap-murder of a Saitama Prefecture girl said Thursday in...
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Jun 14, 2013

Wales touts Hitachi reactors

The two or three nuclear reactors scheduled to be built in northern Wales will bring significant economic benefits rather than fears about nuclear disasters, visiting Welsh economy minister Edwina Hart said.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 14, 2013

Unflinching survival epic recounts tsunami horror

Director Juan Antonio Bayona came out of nowhere — well, Barcelona and the world of music videos, actually — to drop "The Orphanage" on an unsuspecting world in 2007. This chilling and intelligent reinvention of the haunted-house genre went on to become No. 1 at the Spanish box office and also did...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 14, 2013

'The Impossible'

Clint Eastwood's "Hereafter" had the misfortune of having opened in local cinemas just before March 11, 2011. After the trauma of a real-life tsunami hitting Japan, few were in the mood to see a Hollywood special-effects version of the same.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / HOTELS & RESTAURANTS
Jun 14, 2013

Gatsby-inspired cocktail at Swissôtel Nankai Osaka; summer bar at Grand Hyatt Fukuoka; Spanish fair at Royal Park Hotel

Gatsby-inspired cocktail at Swissôtel
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Jun 12, 2013

And the top toy for girls: chameleon Licca-chan

Takara Tomy's Triple Color Change Licca-chan doll, whose hair color changes with the temperature, won the girls' toy category of the Japan Toy Prize on Tuesday, preceding the 52nd Annual International Toy Show that kicks off Thursday.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 12, 2013

Syria bleeds as West watches

The only proper response to those who fret about 'where do you stop?' if the international community intervenes in the Syrian conflict is 'when do you start
Japan Times
WORLD / Politics / FOCUS
Jun 12, 2013

Monitoring scandals unite left, right

A late spring storm of Washington controversies has created a rare event in these partisan, polarized times: a shared I-told-you-so moment for the left and the right.
Japan Times
CULTURE / CULTURE SMASH
Jun 12, 2013

Preserving a classic Japanese art form: tokusatsu magic

Our monster is scaly, spiky, reptilian — a cross between a dinosaur and an irradiated insect that shrieks like an angry bird. Our hero is lean, faintly muscular in a rubbery skintight suit with inscrutable praying-mantis eyes. They face one another, stomping left to right like sumo wrestlers, posing...
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 12, 2013

Why Turkey's revolt will fail

In recent years, mass protests in authoritarian states have succeeded only where the rioters had little or nothing to lose. That isn't the case in Istanbul.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 12, 2013

U.S. intelligence is too dependent on technology

The National Security Agency, now constructing a massive data-storage facility that presumably will chew through everything we say, needs to be reined in.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE FOREIGN ELEMENT
Jun 11, 2013

Japan's Nigerians see symbol of change in masquerade

Anyone wandering the back streets near Omiya Station at 7:20 a.m. on Sunday, June 2, might have passed a particular office building, unremarkable except for two African men standing on a 2nd floor balcony, rope in hand, lowering a car-sized Ugo (eagle) costume down to the parking lot. One of them was...
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health
Jun 11, 2013

Can brain scans explain crime?

University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Adrian Raine, author of "The Anatomy of Violence," believes that advances in brain imagery are helping to explain the biological roots of crime. American Enterprise Institute scholar and psychiatrist Sally Satel, co-author of "Brainwashed," is wary of the seduction...
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jun 9, 2013

Sifting through the rubble of Hashimoto's political ambitions

In 1995, the late University of Illinois professor David G. Goodman observed that when serious disagreements arise between Japanese people and foreigners, the former invariably internalize the debate among themselves.
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health
Jun 9, 2013

U.S. scientists find true 'Lizard King'

Jim Morrison famously wrote in the poem "Celebration of the Lizard" that he was "the Lizard King," a name that stuck. So when a paleontologist who happens to be a Doors fan came across a fossil of a giant lizard, one of the largest ever to tread the planet, he named it Barbaturex morrisoni, after the...
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Jun 9, 2013

Gray wolf to lose U.S. endangered species status

The government moved Friday to end endangered species protections for gray wolves in the lower 48 states, contending that the population of the apex predator has recovered from decades of hunting that drove it to virtual extinction.
Reader Mail
Jun 9, 2013

Cooperation among past enemies

The June 4 AFP-JIJI article "South Korean president gets baptism by fire" is interesting for many reasons. I lived in a small town in North Korea until the end of 1950. I remember colonial life before 1945.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Jun 8, 2013

Encouraging, not comparing, accomplishments

Aging Japan. We hear this phrase all the time. The question is, what are they talking about — the infrastructure? The people? Four Roses whisky?

Longform

Bear attacks have dominated Japanese news headlines in recent months, with 13 people so far having been killed by the animals.
Japan’s bears have been on their killing spree for more than 100 years