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BUSINESS
Jun 12, 2003

Ex-Sony chief to donate retiree benefits to Nagano town

Norio Ohga, former chairman and president of Sony Corp., plans to donate all 1.6 billion yen of his retirement benefits after taxes to the town of Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture, company and town officials said Wednesday.
BUSINESS
Jun 5, 2003

Ohga to get 1.6 billion yen in Sony retirement deal

Sony Corp. plans to pay 1.6 billion yen in retirement allowances to Honorary Chairman Norio Ohga, who resigned as a board member in January, according to a company letter sent to shareholders by Wednesday.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Apr 5, 2003

In a second tongue, mistakes are nature

I taught all of Japan English yesterday. At least it seemed that way. I started out in the morning teaching 3- and 4-year-olds and ended teaching 75-year-olds.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Aug 2, 2002

Postal authorities hope to tap print club revival

Instant photo sticker machines such as the "print club" booths seen in video game arcades, supermarkets and train stations a few years back are again the rage, prompting postal authorities to ponder the potential profits of allowing such photos as personalized stamps.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
May 22, 2002

From the edges of 'reality'

At the most basic level of classification, most paintings can be assigned to one of two broad but fairly clear-cut categories: representational or abstract. This is to say that what appears on the canvas has generally evolved either from people, places or things found in the real world; or from ideas...
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Feb 27, 2002

Hanayo and Tenko: through a lens blurrily

Cocky, irreverant and devil-may-care, invariably to be found surrounded by admirers as he holds forth from behind a big fat cigar, the Neo-Pop painter Takashi Murakami has for the last few years been one of Japan's leading international art stars.
LIFE / Digital / NAME OF THE GAME
Dec 27, 2001

Get ready for Xbox

The last time an American company successfully launched a game console in Japan, Jesse Takamayama was the famous Hawaiian Sumo wrestler and Chad Rowan (aka Akebono) was still in high school. The last time an American company successfully launched a video game console in Japan, a famous hanafuda card...
COMMUNITY
Dec 16, 2001

From pinholes to pixels, photgraphy keeps evolving

The camera on a tripod outside Edward Levinson's countryside home in Chiba Prefecture is deceptive in its simplicity. It has no lens or viewfinder, no focusing dial, and no shutter-release button.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Nov 28, 2001

A new world order revealed

Start with a simple idea, add a slide projector and a turntable, and you have the pleasantly surprising Nicolas Moulin installation, "Pole."
CULTURE / Art
Oct 24, 2001

Life's odd journey and the wonder of Y

With the press conference and vernissage just hours away, workers were hurriedly making final adjustments to the Hara Museum's big new Tadanori Yokoo show when one of them turned to me and said, "You know, many curators were trying for this exhibition." At least that's what I thought she said. As Yokoo,...
CULTURE / Art
Jul 18, 2001

A breakfast to blow your mind

I recall reviewing a group exhibition at an embassy gallery last year and referring to it as a "hodgepodge" of styles and media. So incensed were the amateur curators that they fired off a complaint to the paper protesting the use of the word. When the husband of one of them caught up with me in public,...
CULTURE / Art
Jun 13, 2001

Koga's travels in hyper-reality

One of my favorite cliches about art is the one that says great art comes from great suffering, something that is perhaps overlooked by today's modern art scene with its emphasis on novelty and playfulness.
CULTURE / Art
May 2, 2001

'Girly photographer' charts her own course

It is has been about a decade since the debut of the onnanoko shashinka, an immensely popular group of young Japanese female photographers whose work was largely characterized by simple subjects reflecting their everyday life, captured with a point-and-shoot aesthetic. Initially, the best known of the...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Mar 20, 2001

Drop in on Kanemura's Tokyo

SPIDER'S STRATEGY: Photographs by Osamu Kanemura, with a text by Arata Isozaki. Tokyo: Osiris Co. Ltd., 102 pp., 80 b/w plates, 3,780 yen. In his text accompanying this portfolio of photographs of Tokyo, architect Arata Isozaki writes of the difficulty of deciphering this city. Paris was finally properly...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Feb 12, 2001

Let the spring light the fires

THE PILLOW BOOK OF SPRING AND LAUGHTER: Eroticism in Meiji, Taisho and Showa Japan, by John Stevens. Tokyo: The East Publications, Inc. 156 pp., profusely illustrated, color plates/b/w photos. 4,200 yen. We associate spring pictures ("shunga") with the Edo period, lovers usually fully dressed with...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jan 8, 2001

Tomorrow today in Tokyo

TOKYO X. Photographs by Shunji Ohkura. Afterword translated by Ralph McCarthy, captions translated by Shii Ichiba, envoi by Giles Murray. Tokyo: Kodansha Intl., 2000, 216 pp., 251 plates with endpapers, 3,800 yen. In the afterword to this remarkable collection of pictures, the photographer says that...
JAPAN
Dec 14, 2000

Mori sues over story on gangster ties

Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori filed a libel suit with the Tokyo District Court on Tuesday against a magazine that published an article and photographs allegedly linking him to a rightwing gangster, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda said Wednesday.
JAPAN
Dec 10, 2000

Magazine to run picture of Mori, alleged rightist

In the latest potential headache for Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, a weekly magazine plans to publish photographs of Mori with a man allegedly linked to a crime syndicate in an edition that will hit newsstands this week.
CULTURE / Art
Oct 28, 2000

Identity found among shifting personas

A tour-group traveler posing in front of the Empire State Building; a junkie punk jonesing on a dirty park bench; a mail-order bride photographed standing beside her snaggletoothed, shotgun-toting redneck husband -- Nikki S. Lee is all of these people, and then some.
EDITORIALS
Sep 10, 2000

Old friends are the best

Reports from the United States tell us that some Americans are having their faith restored in a popular postwar Japanese export. The subject of their revived affection is not a car or a motorcycle, not a camera or an audiovisual device, not a laptop personal computer or other advanced information-technology...
LIFE / Digital
Jul 26, 2000

Itsy-bitsy, teeny-tiny . . . camera

oceankey.com/cam.htm The surfcam pointing out from the Ocean Key Resort in Key West, Fla., gives glimpses of leisure boats as they make wakes, and then, as it refreshes every couple minutes, makes them disappear. It's a beautiful seascape even on a CRT, but Sleepyspud just can't wake up in time to catch...
JAPAN
May 2, 2000

'Manga' role-playing draws date-seeking 'otaku' together

The model who goes by the alias Ai O-totsu, or Bumpy Love, is dressed in the crimson high school uniform of her video game personality today, but instead of acting out pubescent fantasies on the computer screen like her electronic double, she's posing for pictures, smiling bashfully and giving out name...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Mar 26, 2000

Yoshihiko Ueda

People often ask Yoshihiko Ueda why he became a photographer. He replies that he has no clear memory of the beginning. "Perhaps it was almost coincidental," he said. His wife offers the explanation that his sister gave him a camera to console him when he was disappointed at failing boyhood examinations....
CULTURE / Books
Mar 15, 2000

Silent films cry out for attention

MASTERPIECES OF JAPANESE SILENT CINEMA. Bilingual (Japanese/English) DVD-ROM (Windows). Tokyo: Urban Connections, Inc. 18,900 yen. The Japanese silent cinema is almost unknown, so little has been available for viewing. Even in a medium where two-thirds of all silent cinema is lost (and perhaps a quarter...
CULTURE / Books
Feb 8, 2000

A great tradition resurrected

SEX AND THE FLOATING WORLD: Erotic Images in Japan 1700-1820, by Timon Screech. London: Reaktion Books, 1999, 320 pp., 156 illustrations, 36 color, 16.95 British pounds. Though there has been much scholarly research of the ukiyo-e, woodblock prints from premodern Japan, one sizable genre within this...
CULTURE / Art
Nov 20, 1999

Something in the air of Japan's 'Deep South'

They were known as the "girlie photographers," dozens of young female photographers who elbowed their way through the society of cameramen to rise to prominence in Japan during the early 1990s. And as the media loves an underdog, critics loved so-called onnanoko shashinka.
LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA
Aug 11, 1999

What's that sound?

Two years ago I wrote about how the Fuji Rock Festival's website saved me a two-hour trip to the festival. Early reports accurately painted a grim picture of chaos created by a freak typhoon, so I decided to stay in Tokyo.
COMMUNITY
Apr 1, 1999

Strike a pose, posing questions -- Klein's vogue

We've all seen the sexy, sultry, precarious, provocative and often preposterous poses of fashion models in fashion magazines. But rarely do we think about the person at the other end of the camera -- the fashion photographer. In the world of fashion, he (and they are mostly men) has become an icon on...

Longform

Mount Fuji is considered one of Japan's most iconic symbols and is a major draw for tourists. It's still a mountain, though, and potential hikers need to properly prepare for any climb.
What it takes to save lives on Mount Fuji