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Reader Mail
May 26, 2013

Weighing the costs and benefits

Judging from Chris Flynn's May 16 response, "Secondhand smoke is the enemy," it appears that the debate on the socialization of health care costs is off the table. Flynn states: "The main thrust behind banning smoking in most places is to reduce the harmful effects of secondhand smoke on nonsmokers."...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
May 25, 2013

Uganda boxing trainer gives expert advice to aspiring pugilists

If you don't get into the ring once or twice, then you're a coward, Geoffrey Ima says as he describes people's attitudes toward boxing in his hometown in Uganda. Ima has been in the ring hundreds of times and came to love boxing so much, he wanted to earn a living from it — a career choice that led...
Japan Times
SOCCER / J. League
May 25, 2013

Moriwaki enjoying challenge playing for Urawa brings

The 27-year-old defender says he was ready for a change of scenery after helping Sanfrecce Hiroshima win theJ. League title last season.
Japan Times
BASKETBALL / HOOP SCOOP
May 25, 2013

Geary's vision, drive keyed Yokohama's title run

There was something refreshing, interesting and fun about the Yokohama B-Corsairs from the beginning. It wasn't always the easiest thing to explain in a few short words.
EDITORIALS
May 25, 2013

Bill threatens the lives of the poor

By tightening procedures to receive livelihood assistance, a bill just submitted to the Diet could end up raising the suicide rate and the number of deaths by hunger.
SOCCER / PREMIER REPORT
May 25, 2013

Cole not fit for England captaincy

He is seen as the type of player who gives footballers a bad name. Someone who typifies all the perceived negatives about the modern-day player.
EDITORIALS
May 25, 2013

Challenge of a lifetime, again

Having conquered Mount Everest for the third time, Yuichiro Miura, 80, demonstrates the physical possibilities of human endurance while inspiring Japan's elderly.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
May 25, 2013

The junkie and his fix

"Weird," he says. "Give me something weird."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 24, 2013

'Kuroyuri Danchi (The Complex)'

Springing up like the proverbial bamboo shoots after a rain storm in the postwar boom years, when they were hailed as ideal communities for the rising middle class, Japan's danchi (public-housing projects) have since acquired a rather dark image as the older ones molder and decay and the original residents...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / HOTELS & RESTAURANTS
May 24, 2013

Japanese afternoon tea; Beatles and disco dinner party; eat off Kutani porcelain

Japanese afternoon tea at Peninsula
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 24, 2013

'The Tree'

Ten-year-old Simone (Morgana Davies) has just lost her dad, felled by a sudden heart attack, and she finds solace high in the branches of a massive fig tree that grows outside her home under the big skies of rural Queensland. Sometimes, late at night, she thinks she can hear his voice; her mother, Dawn...
COMMENTARY / World
May 24, 2013

Global call to women standing on the sidelines

Hardly a day goes by without a news story on some violation of women's rights. In recent months, appalling incidents of violence against women and girls — from Delhi to Johannesburg to Cleveland — have sparked public outrage and demands to tackle these horrific abuses.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
May 23, 2013

Guitarist Dustin Wong brings singer Takako Minekawa out on a 'Toropical' journey

Guitarist Dustin Wong hesitates for a split second. It's a pause that would go unnoticed during most other sets, but Wong has spent the last 40 minutes seemingly in a trance while playing guitar and looping the notes via an array of pedals in front of him. The flurry of interlocking sounds he's produced...
BASKETBALL
May 23, 2013

Japanese women face Griner during preparation for upcoming tourney

A 23-point loss to the WNBA's Phoenix Mercury in a Sunday exhibition game in Phoenix was the first big test for the Japan women's national basketball team as it prepares for the 25th FIBA Asia Championship for Women.
Reader Mail
May 23, 2013

Hitler cited his religious faith

While there does seem to be some disagreement among historians about the degree of Adolf Hitler's religious beliefs, I think it's inaccurate for Jennifer Kim, in her May 16 letter, to claim his Catholicism was abandoned in his youth.
Reader Mail
May 23, 2013

Inventors of human rights?

Jennifer Kim, in her letter of May 16, seems to be doing a bit of an Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto special. She appears to be suggesting that the mass murder of heretics [Cathars] was necessary at the time. She seems to take the apparent wrongness of their teaching — which supposedly took the anti-life...
COMMENTARY / World
May 22, 2013

Why China's developmental state says no to liberalism

Modern history is the story of how liberal democracy, originating in Britain and America, spread around the world. This may sound like an absurd fantasy. In actuality, this Whiggish narrative of progress underpins most newspaper editorials, political commentary and speeches in the West, and frames larger...
COMMENTARY / World
May 22, 2013

Five myths about Benghazi

The events surrounding the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, look dramatically different depending on your politics. Republicans tend to see a cover-up and a scandal. Democrats see an attempt to damage President Barack Obama and...
COMMENTARY / Japan
May 22, 2013

Why Abenomics hurts women

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's acknowledgement of the unleashed potential of women should herald a new beginning for female empowerment in Japan. Yet his proposals to encourage more women to remain in the workforce actually may do more to hurt their prospects by merely reinforcing existing prejudices toward...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Entertainment news
May 21, 2013

X Japan waxes lyrical at Madame Tussauds debut

This Monday, members of the seminal metal band X Japan were in Odaiba rubbing shoulders with the likes of Brad Pitt, Lady Gaga and AKB48's Yuko Oshima. The catch? They were all made out of wax.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Society
May 21, 2013

Visa violators stage sit-in to stay

Visa violators kick off a five-day protest at the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau to protest plans to deport overstayers en masse on planes.
JAPAN / EXPLAINER
May 21, 2013

Fukushima No. 1 can't keep its head above tainted water

More than two years into the triple-meltdown crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, workers continue to wage a desperate battle to keep the stricken reactors cool while trying to contain the 400 tons of radioactive water produced by the process each day.
Japan Times
WORLD
May 21, 2013

Avoid excuses, man up, Obama tells black graduates

President Barack Obama on Sunday summoned the graduates of historically black Morehouse College to "transform the way we think about manhood," urging the young men to avoid the temptation to make excuses and to take responsibility for their families and their communities.
COMMENTARY / World
May 21, 2013

Turkey's Erdogan undone by Obama and Assad

The car bombs that killed more than 40 people on May 11 in a town in southern Turkey are a reckoning for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

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