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Japan Times
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Aug 28, 2009

Expo has designs on shoppers

Considering the heavy hit corporate Japan has suffered from the current economic downturn, it was only to be expected that entries for the nation's leading industrial design prize, the Good Design Award, would be down this year.
Japan Times
CULTURE
Aug 28, 2009

Cheeky for charity

It is no surprise that an adult entertainment broadcaster would be concerned about the spread of the HIV virus and AIDS. But for one satellite channel in Japan known for silly parodies and wacky porn programming, that concern goes beyond immediate commercial interests — to trying to reverse wilting...
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 27, 2009

Promise and peril of global change

MUNICH — Panta rhei. Everything flows.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 27, 2009

Time to reject tyranny and health insecurity

NEW YORK — Since 2001, under the guise of "reforms," the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has adopted Bush's undemocratic dogma of market fundamentalism — dysfunctional deregulation, privatization and corporate money games. Such dogma destroyed America's financial systems, social safety net and manufacturing,...
BASKETBALL
Aug 26, 2009

Five Arrows may skip season over finances

Just days before bj-league teams begin playing preseason games, the Takamatsu Five Arrows' season and future existence are in limbo.
Japan Times
JAPAN / ELECTION 2009
Aug 26, 2009

Hokkaido figures to be key showdown for LDP vets

SAPPORO — The winds of change are blowing nationwide as the Lower House election nears.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Aug 25, 2009

Taiji told to stop dolphin carnage or sister ties end

The town of Broome on the coast of Western Australia has put its sister city, Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture, on notice: Stop the yearly dolphin slaughter or the relationship is off.
JAPAN / ELECTION 2009
Aug 25, 2009

Tanaka battling in New Komeito heartland

AMAGASAKI, Hyogo Pref. — Yasuo Tanaka, the leader of New Party Nippon and former governor of Nagano, is attempting to unseat New Komeito heavyweight Tetsuzo Fuyushiba in a race widely seen as a test of Tanaka's popularity in a region where his volunteer activities after the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake...
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 25, 2009

Opening a regulated market for kidney sales

PRINCETON, N.J. — The arrest in New York last month of Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, a Brooklyn businessman whom police allege tried to broker a deal to buy a kidney for $160,000, coincided with the passage of a law in Singapore that some say will open the way for organ trading there.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / HAVE YOUR SAY
Aug 25, 2009

One pocket knife, nine days' lockup

Following are a selection of readers' responses to the July 28 Hotline to Nagatacho column headlined "Pocket knife lands tourist, 74, in lockup."
EDITORIALS
Aug 24, 2009

Promoting renewable energy

To combat global warming, the government has a middle-term goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels. To achieve this goal, it will be important to spread the use of renewable energy. As part of this effort, the government plans to increase solar power generation...
Reader Mail
Aug 23, 2009

American off-color humor is rare

I am grateful to have Rick H.'s Aug. 13 letter, " 'Sexcentric' jokes abound in Japan," and agree with him that Japan, like any other nation, is far from pure. Space in my recent Counterpoint articles did not permit going into a host of other forms of humor, such as rakugo and manzai, which are still...
Reader Mail
Aug 23, 2009

An astonishing sense of denial

What a ludicrous interpretation of World War II history. If Satsuo Matsumoto wrote such a letter about Germany and Adolf Hitler's war to "liberate" Europe, he might be arrested and sent to prison for Holocaust denial. Germany can't change its dark and hellish Nazi past, but at least it won't tolerate...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Aug 23, 2009

Obama hails Lincoln — but is he on course to fail the LBJ way?

"Some of our bankers had shown themselves either incompetent or dishonest in their handling of the people's funds. They had used the money entrusted to them in speculations and unwise loans. . . . It was the government's job to straighten out this situation and do it as quickly as possible, and the job...
CULTURE / Books
Aug 23, 2009

Rich material found in penury

It is 1995, that defining year of the Kobe earthquake, the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, the year a man in Osaka confesses to dismembering the bodies of three women at his home in Osaka; the year a Buddhist priest is arrested for raping over 100 women. The times are out of joint, and the author...
Reader Mail
Aug 23, 2009

Letter from an alternate universe

I have great admiration for Satsuo Matsumoto's Aug. 20 letter, "Left keeps trying to disgrace Japan," because conceiving and executing such a piece of writing that is so obtuse is almost a work of art. No, it is a work of art! It is a work of brilliant surrealism that I will frame for my wall.
Japan Times
LIFE
Aug 23, 2009

Japan's creeping natural disaster

In October 2010, government officials from almost every country in the world will meet in Nagoya for the 10th Conference of Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP10). The aim of the Convention, which came into effect in 1993, is simple but momentous: To maintain the richness of life on...
COMMENTARY
Aug 23, 2009

Scrutinizing the Chinese threat to Taiwan

LOS ANGELES — In the United States we refer to it as the Powell Doctrine. And it helps unravel a bit of mystery about what China is up to these days. Remember Colin Powell? Before Barack Obama rode into the U.S. scene on his white horse, Powell was America's most admired black public political figure....
Japan Times
JAPAN
Aug 22, 2009

Japan's H1N1 cases at flu epidemic stage

On the basis of substantially increased hospitalizations, the H1N1 swine flu outbreak was declared an epidemic by the National Institute of Infectious Diseases on Friday.
EDITORIALS
Aug 22, 2009

Funding for scientific research

The ¥14 trillion supplementary budget for fiscal 2009 has a problematic feature. It allocates as much as ¥4.36 trillion — about 30 percent of the budget — to 46 funds, 30 of them newly established. Money in the funds can be used "flexibly" for more than a year, raising the possibility that bureaucrats...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Aug 22, 2009

The right word and the right to choose it

If you are a foreigner living in Japan, odds are high that language learning has played a key role in your residency.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Aug 22, 2009

Japan, Brazil sow seeds of hope in Mozambique

Prime Minister Taro Aso's list of diplomatic accomplishments may be short but Japan's latest aid project in southeastern Africa could eventually become a key resource to support the nation's food security.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 21, 2009

Traveling through a symphony of art

Several weeks ago at the Fuji Rock music festival, I realized that I might be in the wrong game. The art world is about the object: You look at a work, often something inert, and attempt to discern from it an emotion, a meaning or a truth. But music irresistibly moves you, it mysteriously reaches through...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 21, 2009

Indie hardman opens the tear ducts

Sion Sono is Japan's edgy indie director par excellence, whose internationally acclaimed films expose social ills and challenge taboos in a variety of genres and moods, from the death-trip chills of "Jisatsu Circle" ("Suicide Club," 2001) to the black-comic laughs of "Ai no Mukidashi" ("Love Exposure,"...

Longform

A sinkhole in Yashio, which emerged in January, was triggered by a ruptured, aging sewer pipe. Authorities worry that similar sections of infrastructure across the country are also at risk of corrosion.
That sinking feeling: Japan’s aging sewers are an infrastructure time bomb