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Japan Times
BASEBALL / Japanese Baseball
Oct 6, 2009

Valentine tight-lipped over rumors of Marlins post

CHIBA — Bobby Valentine's return to television may not last that long after all.
COMMENTARY
Oct 5, 2009

Losing control of the heat

LONDON — My youngest daughter is 17, so she will have lived most of her life before the worst of the warming hits. But her later years will not be easy, and her kids will have it very hard from the start. As for their kids, I just don't know.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Oct 4, 2009

Mamoru Mohri: A spaceman speaks

When future historians document the story of Japanese space exploration, 2009 will likely figure as the year when the nation put two high-profile rocket launch failures, in 1999 and 2003, firmly behind it and, quite literally, took off.
Reader Mail
Oct 4, 2009

National health plan preferred

Regarding the Sept. 29 article "Brace for a possible spring shock": I'd just like to say that private health insurance companies can give policyholders a hard time about honoring claims. I had private insurance during my first year in Japan and ended up having to go to a hospital in Iwate Prefecture...
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / Japan Pulse
Oct 3, 2009

Japanese gamers buy up Google's City Streets

So fitting that the Internet titan Google is turning the world into a game a Monopoly. Wanna buy Omotesando? Sure, but can you pay the property tax?
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Oct 3, 2009

Welcome to autumn, and the insect world

Welcome to autumn, the spider season. Spiders are everywhere on our island. Should you dare to go hiking or walk the pilgrimage there will be elaborate spider webs, constructed by the best Japanese spider engineers, hanging taut across your every path.
TENNIS
Oct 2, 2009

Sharapova, Jankovic advance to semifinals

Former world No. 1s Maria Sharapova and Jelena Jankovic remained on course for a final showdown with quarterfinal wins at the Toray Pan Pacific Open on Thursday, while Ai Sugiyama raged against the dying light to move into the semifinals of the doubles competition.
CULTURE / Film
Oct 2, 2009

'Akumu no Elevator'

Movies are confidence tricks played on willing victims. The bullets are blanks and the sex is faked, but we usually want to believe, as long as the lights are down, that it's all real. Creating that belief — or rather, that suspension of disbelief — has long been Hollywood's goal.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Oct 2, 2009

Various Artists "Yes We Can! Obama Classics"

"Yes We Can! Obama Classics" is an album that sets excerpts of U.S. President Barak Obama's famous speeches to classical music, simple as that. Conceptually it's an interesting idea — harnessing the emotion of Obama's memorable words and setting them to powerful orchestration. The execution is not...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Oct 2, 2009

'The Chicken, the Fish and the King Crab'

Food — once abhorred by Hollywood directors like Billy Wilder for the way it "messed up a scene," (on the other hand, iced drinks and cocktails were a favored adornment) — has become as important to cinema as romance. Or even more so, if the recent batch of self-help manual-like love stories are...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 2, 2009

Shin hanga bringing ukiyo-e back to life

The great print works of ukiyo-e, by the likes of Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Utamaro, became fine art almost by accident. Originally mass produced for the popular market, their status was roughly equivalent to that of illustrated calendars and posters of pop stars today. But, ironically, the fact that they...
Japan Times
JAPAN / CABINET INTERVIEW
Oct 1, 2009

Chiba lays out new justice policies

Justice Minister Keiko Chiba says she will aim to submit a bill next year to the regular Diet session that would revise the Civil Code to enable married couples to have different surnames.
CULTURE / Books
Sep 27, 2009

Murder with hefty history

PAPER BUTTERFLY, by Diane Wei Liang. Simon and Schuster, 2009, 227 pages, $24.00 (hardcover) Reviewed by Mark Schreiber Mei Wang, the Beijing-based female private investigator who made her first appearance in "The Eye of Jade" (2008), is back. Burned out by the demands of her job in the Ministry of Public...
CULTURE / Books
Sep 27, 2009

The ink-stained road: impressions of Japan

JAPAN THROUGH WRITER'S EYES, edited by Elizabeth Ingrams. Eland, 2009, 336 pp., $29.95 (paper) Reviewed by Stephen Mansfield Recent years have seen a number of excellent anthologies of writings on Japan, including "Japan: True Stories of Life on the Road" and the superb "Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Sep 27, 2009

Denied bear necessities of life

About a week ago, while browsing the Internet, I came across a headline at the BBC Web site that made me pause: "Bear injures 9 at bus terminal." The first thought that crossed my mind was, "Why was a bear waiting for a bus?"
Japan Times
LIFE
Sep 27, 2009

Let's Bike!

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama could have made a stronger impact at the United Nations Summit on Climate Change in New York last week had he trumpeted another environmentally laudable proposal in addition to his declared goal of Japan cutting its greenhouse-gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels...
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 26, 2009

Natural gas Down Under bound for Japan by 2014

SYDNEY — Resources-rich Australia has signed on to provide Japanese households and industries a reliable source of natural gas for decades to come.
CULTURE / Music
Sep 25, 2009

Burning bright, a light that will never go out

While Sonic Youth just keep getting older and Dinosaur Jr are now all seniors, The Cribs have taken a shortcut to making their own baby-based name sound ironic. The Wakefield, England, band — initially based around twins Ryan and Gary Jarman and their younger brother, Ross — were all in their mid-20s...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 25, 2009

She "Orion"

In the anime "Macross," the top chart sensation was Sharon Apple, a cybernetic singer who bewitched a fictional future with her laboratory-engineered music and hologramatic cleavage. Here in real-life Japan, 2009, the defining act is Perfume: three carefully choreographed girls who sing autotune-crippled...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 25, 2009

'Fast & Furious'

The article "the" is missing from the latest installment of the "The Fast and the Furious" franchise, now in its fourth sequel — a probable maneuver to lead people into thinking this is the original and arguably the best "THE Fast and THE Furious" — and lure them into theaters. Grammatical antics...
MORE SPORTS
Sep 23, 2009

Track standouts eager to end season on a positive note

KAWASAKI — After a series of fierce battles throughout the year, all the participants surely have some fatigue. But still they gave their word that they'd push themselves to the max one final time in the 2009 season.
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / IGADGET
Sep 23, 2009

Sony scores with basic Walkman

Sony goes back to its roots: After trying to copy Apple's touch screen, Sony has gone back to basics with the latest addition to the A-Series Walkman line, the NW-A840 series. The new Walkmans don't do touch or the Internet. Instead the emphasis is on playing music and videos. They do this with a beautiful,...

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