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JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Dec 13, 2006

Polonium, peacocks -- and a dead spy

It's one of the biggest stories of the year -- and certainly the most unusual. I'm talking about the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy living in London who was poisoned with a radioactive isotope last month. Nothing like this has been seen for nearly 20 years, back when the Cold War...
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design
Dec 12, 2006

BOEGE Polos, up-market UNIQLO, blood-free diamonds . . .

Polos reimagined
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Dec 12, 2006

Pluck, trim, extend -- making up is hard to do

The word kesho (makeup) is beautiful to look at -- made up of the kanji characters ke (to metamorphose) and sho (to decorate). Combined, they evoke far more than the mere act of making up. Novelists have poured much ink over the depiction of a woman applying powder, dabbing rouge or performing that special...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WORDS TO LIVE BY
Dec 12, 2006

Heizaburo and Reiko Kawaguchi

Heizaburo and Reiko Kawaguchi, 84 and 81, from Kobe, believe that simple meals and large servings of complex ideas from Japanese manga, anime and classical literature pave the way to a long and happy life. Trained as a fukuryu (underwater kamikaze diver), and later head of a 300-year-old family business...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Dec 10, 2006

What remains 'Japanese' in such climates of change?

What is national character, and how does it differ from custom, manners and fashion? People talk about "the Japanese" as if referring to a nationality with an immutable quality that has existed and will continue to exist throughout the ages; and yet, Japan and the Japanese of the past are so different...
CULTURE / Music
Dec 8, 2006

Tom Waits "Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards"

Although his trademark raspy growl and love for schizophrenic concoctions of sound aren't for everyone, visitors to the whacked-out, downtrodden world of Tom Waits are rightfully mesmerized by its beauty and brilliance. With a persona that's equal parts grizzled farmhand, ringmaster and mad scientist,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / CERAMIC SCENE
Dec 7, 2006

New forms of old traditions at the Japan Society

Over the past several years there have been quite a few exhibitions of Japanese ceramics overseas, but "Contemporary Clay/Japanese Ceramics for the New Century," which is now at the Japan Society Gallery in New York, is the most brilliant by far.
CULTURE / Books
Dec 3, 2006

Magic in the ordinary world

BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, 334 pp., $24.95 (cloth). Just as fiction that is purely mundane can be, well, mundane, fiction that is only fantastic is often only dull. Authors such as Paul Auster and Jonathan...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Dec 2, 2006

China filmmaker finds wartime sex slaves

In 1995, Chinese filmmaker Ban Zhongyi set out to meet a woman in a remote part of central China to record her story of sexual enslavement by the Imperial Japanese Army.
COMMENTARY
Nov 28, 2006

Energy grief ahead for EU

LONDON -- If all the energy experts, the analysts and the consultants are right -- and often they are not -- the people of Western Europe, and especially Britain, are in for an uncomfortable time over the next few years.
Japan Times
LIFE
Nov 26, 2006

7 pearls of wisdom

YUUKI A time of change
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Nov 26, 2006

The persistence of culture

KYOTO: A Cultural Sojourn, photos by Gorazd Vilhar, text by Charlotte Anderson. Tokyo: IBC Publishing, 2006, 116 pp., profusely illustrated, 2,800 yen (cloth). The final plate in this exceptionally gorgeous photo collection is the jagged, mirrored facade of Kyoto Station, a structure so spectacularly...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Nov 25, 2006

German potter carries on raku tradition

BERLIN -- Despite a tradition of more than 400 years, raku ceramics are now not well-known in Japan beyond the tea ceremony.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Nov 24, 2006

Netted by the charms of fishy Kochi

Arched around the underbelly of Shikoku and following the great indentation of Tosa Bay carved into that island by the Pacific, Kochi Prefecture is one of those places over which a sense of isolation has long seemed to hang.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 23, 2006

Japan Folk Crafts Museum celebrates 70th anniversary

On first encountering Korean folk paintings, the avid collector Soetsu Yanagi (1889-1961) was so intrigued that he wrote, "The beauty of this Korean painting is beyond compare."
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Nov 21, 2006

Label not enough for a healthy diet

Next time you go grocery shopping, take a closer look at the beverages, yogurt and other packaged foods on display in the store you're visiting. You'll most likely find a number of products bearing a special logo and a carefully worded sentence touting their health benefits.
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
Nov 19, 2006

Scourge of skinnies stands firm on fleshiness

A third of the models who appeared in Madrid's civic-sponsored Cibeles collections last year were banned from the same fashion event this September. The move -- which triggered debate in and beyond fashion circles around the world -- came after city officials declared that the women's extremely underweight...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Nov 16, 2006

An ambassador of enlightenment

When I was a teenager living in New York some 20 years ago, I bought a tiny introduction to Zen Buddhism from a bookstore in midtown Manhattan. A $1 clearance-sale copy, it was so small that I could slip it into my back pocket.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 9, 2006

Tokyo National Museum shows Buddhist masterpieces

Living in a land still largely covered with forest, it is not surprising that Japanese have a special reverence toward wood. We see this particularly in traditional architecture, where wood is not only chosen to reveal its best qualities, but is largely left unpainted so that its beauty improves with...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Nov 3, 2006

It's not about porn, it's all about art

Lucile Hadzihalilovic strides into a room and the mood immediately becomes dense with awe. It's not just her striking looks or her height (over 1.85 meters in stockings), but the way she seems to mute these things behind a natural quietness and engaging shyness, as if she's whispering: "Please don't...
CULTURE / TV & Streaming / CHANNEL SURF
Oct 22, 2006

NHK's "Premium 10," Nihon TV's "Catherine the Great" and more

On Sept. 23, 35,000 people flocked to the Tsumagoi resort area in Shizuoka Prefecture to attend a concert featuring folk-rock singer Takuro Yoshida and the soft rock trio Kagu-yahime. In 1975 these two artists played for 12 hours at the same site in front of 50,000 fans at the first-ever concert of its...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Oct 20, 2006

Inventing his genres

'It's been insane," sighs Steve Reich, grinning as he settles down in his chair. Reich celebrated his 70th birthday earlier this month, and it's had him shuttling from New York to London and back for numerous concerts of his works. Now he is in Tokyo, where he spoke with The Japan Times, as a recipient...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 19, 2006

"Ceremonial Paintings of Northern Ethnic Minorities in Vietnam"

Shinsei Bank Headquarters Closes in 12 days
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Oct 17, 2006

Visiting a theme park sure beats working, unless . . .

Japan has lots of young people who are out of work or not even in the hunt for a job. The government estimates that 850,000 people, from teens through to their 30s, fall into the category of NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training). Then there are the "freeters," youths who only work odd jobs...
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
Oct 15, 2006

Intimacy crusader strives to rekindle Japan's fires of marital passion

At first glance, 46-year-old Mayumi Futamatsu looks like a regular housewife. But as someone who's "seen both heaven and hell" in her two marriages, she's a woman with a mission to help all women to be happy -- through having better sex lives.
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Oct 8, 2006

Beware a 'beauty' that would deceive the nation

'Japan lost the war, and Bushido [the samurai spirit] perished. But then the human being was born for the first time in the womb of truth called decadence."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 5, 2006

A daughter's conversation

At last year's Venice Biennale, photographer Miyako Ishiuchi (b. 1947) represented Japan with her "mother's" photography series. Featuring mostly black-and-white prints of her late mother's possessions -- lingerie, shoes and cosmetics -- it was one of the biennale's highlights.

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