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COMMENTARY / World
Jul 22, 2008

Rights of rational beings who are not human

MELBOURNE — On June 25, in a historic vote, the Spanish parliament's Commission for the Environment, Agriculture and Fisheries declared its support for The Great Ape Project, a proposal to grant rights to life, liberty and protection from torture to our closest nonhuman relatives: chimpanzees, bonobos,...
LIFE / Language
Jul 22, 2008

Katakana makes Japanese trendy and accessible

Words and phrases in katakana may appear to be easily recognizable to non-native speakers of Japanese, but they are often fiendishly difficult. This generally comes as a surprise to Japanese, who naturally assume that we can understand katakana words readily, seeing as many of them originated in foreign...
EDITORIALS
Jul 21, 2008

Incongruous with the facts

The Tokyo High Court has upheld a 2005 Mito District Court decision that granted a retrial to two men who were convicted of a 1967 murder-robbery and spent 29 years behind bars. The case lacked material evidence and the prosecution relied on confessions to build the case.
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Jul 20, 2008

All this fuss over just a little drink at a . . . love hotel

The big tabloid scoop last week was snagged by the woman's weekly Josei Seven, which caught celebrity/announcer Mona Yamamoto and Yomiuri Giants shortstop Tomohiro Nioka in a love-hotel tryst. The reason the incident hit such a big nerve in the media is that the night the tryst took place was also the...
OLYMPICS
Jul 20, 2008

Kobayashi chases Olympic dream

Yuriko Kobayashi is Beijing-bound, but that's not her terminal station.
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
Jul 20, 2008

Fly fanboys in the living room

Parents the world over would surely prefer their children not to throw things about. It's just plain bad manners, among other things. But Atsushi Kikuchi, a serious-looking father of two boys, positively encourages it. And, he evenmaintains, his sons' ballistic behavior has produced considerable benefits...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Jul 19, 2008

A well-armed goddess

On July 2, at the lowest tide of the year, my neighbors and I prayed to the goddess of the sea. The islanders call her Benten (also known as Benzaiten), and she lives on her own special island, just off the coast of Shiraishi Island. Here she convenes with the sea and brings us luck, prosperity (well,...
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Jul 18, 2008

Can iPhone infiltrate Japan's mobile tribes?

Kentaro Tohyama is proud of his new iPhone. He stood overnight in line to get it when the device became available in Japan for the first time. But the 29-year-old computer engineer isn't about to part with his made-in-Japan cell phone either.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jul 18, 2008

Pop Levi goes slightly wrong

"It was a very obsessive thing," says Jonathan Pop Levi about the recording of his new album of warped pop music, "Never Never Love." "It took six days a week for 12 hours a day for four months to get it to sound that way. Especially in the vocals; if a computer could do a perfect impression of a human,...
COMMENTARY
Jul 17, 2008

Let's hope it's over soon

The world is now in the grip of a first-class financial crisis. Some will be hit harder than others, but no one is going to escape. Final confirmation of this has arrived with the news that the two giant mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, pillars of American life that underwrite, or insure,...
JAPAN
Jul 17, 2008

Are 24-hour shops a waste of energy?

Are 24-hour convenience stores and other late-night businesses eco-friendly?
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / IN BLOOM
Jul 16, 2008

Flax

It was the schooner Hesperus, That sailed the wint'ry sea; And the skipper had taken his little daughter, To bear him company.Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,Her cheeks like the dawn of day, And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds That ope in the month of May.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Jul 16, 2008

Lives and a death

CHUKOTKA, Russia — This month, instead of writing this column as usual at my desk in Hokkaido, I am writing from a desk on board the Clipper Odyssey as we cross the Gulf of Anadyr in Russia's far northeastern Chukotka region. Our voyage began at Otaru, Hokkaido, and we have taken in southern Sakhalin,...
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design
Jul 15, 2008

Vivienne Westwood, Ebi-chan in Maquillage and more

The latest Vivienne Westwood exhibition rolls into Tokyo this week. After the acclaimed "Vivienne Westwood: 35 Years in Fashion" held at the Mori Arts Center in 2005, this show includes one of the largest fashion books ever published, and is sure to be an instant hit with Westwood's huge Japanese fan...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 13, 2008

Ukraine's path will set the course for Russia

MOSCOW — Russia and the West are losing each other yet again. The magnetic attraction and repulsion between the two has been going on for centuries. Indeed, historians have counted as many as 25 such cycles since the reign of Czar Ivan III.
Japan Times
Features
Jul 13, 2008

Japan's culture policy lingers in limbo

It's a fact that has long puzzled devotees and plain old tourists alike. Japan's manga and anime arts have been wowing the world for more than a decade, and yet the national government still hasn't got around to setting up a proper museum for their enjoyment, preservation and study.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jul 13, 2008

Beauty of the beasts: mythological and real

A BRUSH WITH ANIMALS: Japanese Paintings 1700-1950, by Robert Schaap, with essays by Willem van Gulik, Henk Herwig, Arendie Herwig-Kempers, Daniel McKee and Andrew Thompson. Leiden: Society of Japanese Arts (distributed by Hotei/Brill), 2007, 206 pp. with 275 color illustrations, $117 (cloth), $81 (paper) This...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 12, 2008

U.S. author spreads 'made-in-China' boycott word

Curiosity is the only thing that drove author Sara Bongiorni into launching her family boycott of Chinese products in 2005.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Q&A
Jul 12, 2008

Steady now: quick tips on quake preparation

Earthquakes are a fact of life in Japan. Only one month ago, a 7.2-magnitude temblor and a number of aftershocks struck the Tohoku region, killing 13 in Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate prefectures and leaving 10 still listed as missing in Miyagi and Akita prefectures.
BUSINESS
Jul 12, 2008

Consumer gloom hits record level

Higher gasoline prices and food costs have eroded the spending power of Japanese consumers and sent them to their most pessimistic level ever, according to records that have been kept for the past 26 years.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Jul 12, 2008

Climbing Mount Misen

I recently took a group of tourists on a sail through the Seto Inland Sea for three days. Our destination was Miyajima, home of the Great Torii Gate and Itsukushima Shrine (built in A.D. 593), a World Heritage site since 1996.
Reader Mail
Jul 10, 2008

Emotional needs of 'generation Z'

Jenny Uechi's article is phrased in terms of a dominating opposition in Japanese society between seken -- the society or people that one deals with -- and what her article looks forward to -- namely, an "individualist revolution."

Longform

In 2020, 38% of all households were single-person. That figure is projected to rise to 44.3% by 2050.
The rise of AI companionship in a lonely Japan