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Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / THEN AND NOW
Mar 4, 2005

Happy in the haze of a hanami hour

The 1830s wood-block print below depicts hanami (cherry-blossom viewing) on the banks of the Sumida River. A group of young women and girls are on an excursion, and, with their elaborate hairstyles and fancy, uniform kimono, it appears they are apprentice geisha from licensed quarters nearby. Like teenage...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Feb 27, 2005

New truths from broken conventions: travel writing outside Japan

MUSASHINO IN TUSCANY: Japanese Overseas Travel Literature, 1860-1912, by Susanna Fessler. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2004, 297 pp., + xii pp., 29 b/w illustrations, 2004, $65.00 (cloth). Japan has a long history of travel literature. From the 10th-century "Tosa...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / NATURE TRAVEL
Feb 20, 2005

There's big, and Hoover Dam big

Take 4,360 cubic meters of concrete (enough to pave a single-lane highway from San Francisco to New York), add 21,000 workers (but deduct an average of 50 a day due to injury or death), stir in 5 million, 8-cubic-meter buckets of cement and 950 km of steel piping, then garnish the lot with a dog that...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Feb 20, 2005

Ah-choo! Picked up an allergy to the hay-fever industry

Last week the pharmaceutical company Riken announced that it was developing a new desensitivity treatment for serious allergy sufferers. The treatment program would entail fifty or so injections over a three-year period, which is quite a reduction in time. I should know. I received biweekly or monthly...
Features / WEEK 3
Feb 20, 2005

Operation Evacuation

Not only are they a biodiversity disaster, but the millions of sugi (cedars) planted as official policy in the postwar years to yield cheap timber -- but which are now more expensive to harvest than the cost of imports -- have become a serious health hazard across Japan.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Feb 18, 2005

Pristine paradise an hour from Tokyo

Thanks to the newly opened Noto International Airport, Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture is now just a one-hour flight from Tokyo, making one of the Hokuriku region's most popular tourist spots -- famed for its hot springs, local festivals, beaches and mountain scenery -- far more accessible.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / CERAMIC SCENE
Feb 16, 2005

Former prime minister's pride of pots

"On a sunny day I go to the fields, and, when it rains, I read. Simple enough, isn't it?" Sounds like the words of a cute obachan out in the countryside, but these are the words of former Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa who now leads a quiet, secluded life.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Feb 12, 2005

As cute as cute can be

A friend who visited these fair islands for the first time last fall had this to say of his weekend-to-weekend impressions of Japan.
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Feb 10, 2005

Learning how to make the most of middle age

It's widely acknowledged that the Japanese not only tend to look younger than people in the West, some think and behave that way too. After all, this is a nation fostered on kodomo bunka (kiddie culture), visible in everything from fashion to architecture.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 9, 2005

Lost metallic art revived at last

After some 50 years of trial and error in Akita, a remote northern city, Biko Hayashi, 67, has succeeded in reviving a rare metal craft known as kin gin mokumegane (literally, "gold and silver wood grain metal"), a skill that was developed and then promptly lost almost 300 years ago during the Edo Period....
EDITORIALS
Feb 7, 2005

Banking on safer cash cards

In recent months, Japan has been hit by a new wave of crime: cash-card forgery. According to banks, cash withdrawals by forged cards have amounted to hundreds of millions of yen. At stake is the security of deposits. Action is urgently needed on two fronts: crime prevention and loss compensation.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Feb 5, 2005

Kerel Zebrakovsky

Karel Zebrakovsky, ambassador of the Czech Republic to Japan, came late to the role of diplomat. A man of enthusiasm and wide, cultivated tastes, he finds delight in everything he does, and in the different appointments he has held. He has the right attitude to be representative of his country. "I am...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Feb 5, 2005

National Children's Centers cater to body, spirit

In July 2000, after 15 years heading the International Section of the Children's Castle, Teri Suzanne left the play and educational center in Aoyama, Tokyo, and became a freelance bilingual specialist. Two years later she was employed as program adviser to the 14 National Children's Centers of Japan's...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Feb 2, 2005

Miracles of the moment in Saburo Teshigawara's dance

Dancer, choreographer and artist Saburo Teshigawara works in a time zone of his own. In the 24 years since he came on the dance scene, Teshigawara has transformed the definition of movement. His work with his group Karas and major international companies, including the Frankfurt Ballet and the Opera...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Jan 31, 2005

Far-fetched redesigns between the lines

NEW YORK -- "Contrapuntal reading," as Edward Said called it, is the ability to read between the lines. The reader must be able to have what is referred to, but not described, play off the main descriptive concern. This ability is particularly important with novels written while empire-building was in...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Jan 29, 2005

Take this job and love it

Maybe it was Benjamin Disraeli or maybe it was Mark Twain or maybe it was me who said, "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics . . . followed by Japanese financial data."
CULTURE / TV & Streaming / CHANNEL SURF
Jan 23, 2005

"The Background of His Excellency President Bush" on TBS and more

TBS will present one of the stranger variety-show combinations of recent memory on Wednesday at 9 p.m. Tetsuya Chikushi is the respected veteran print journalist who helms the network's nightly news program. He'll be be co-hosting a program with the ubiquitous comedy duo Bakusho Mondai called "The Background...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jan 23, 2005

Gothic influence creeps out of the darkness and into the limelight

IN LIGHT OF SHADOWS: More Gothic Tales, by Izumi Kyoka, translated and with essays by Charles Shiro Inouye. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004, 180 pp., $16.00 (paper). The first (1993) edition of Charles Inouye's prior volume of Izumi Kyoka's stories was simply called "Three Tales of Mystery...
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Jan 20, 2005

Wondrous fall whiteout heralded a warming winter of discontent

T here is nothing quite like writing controversially for stirring up a response, and commonly those responses come as a mixture of extremes.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 19, 2005

Not a whodunit but a whydunit

Coming last in a daylong round of media interviews, I was expecting my 40 minutes with Shinji Aoyama to be strained, as in "I'm so tired I can hardly stand." Instead, he came into the meeting room at Toho with a smile and a brisk manner, as in "I'm just getting warmed up." While he was obviously there...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Jan 15, 2005

For better or worse: the 400th column

Welcome to the 400th Japan Lite column! If you have been reading this column since 1997, then congratulations on our 400th anniversary. Four hundred weekend dates is longer than most unmarried couples make it. How does it feel to be 400?
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Dec 30, 2004

Japan gripped by obsession with pure love

2004 was the year of jun-ai (pure love), epitomized by the huge popularity of Yon-sama (the reverential nickname for Bae Yong Joon, star of the hit Korean drama "Winter Sonata") and a craze for sentimental love stories that gripped the nation from Hokkaido to the Okinawa.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 29, 2004

Buy local produce

Japanese films had a good 2004, even if eight of the 10 top box-office slots went to Hollywood. The Japanese exhibition business is coming to resemble the American one, with more multiplex screens and wider openings. This structure favors major Hollywood product -- the latest "Harry Potter" or "Lord...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 22, 2004

Making love from the inside out

Vital Rating: * * * 1/2 (out of 5) Director: Shinya Tsukamoto Running time: 86 minutes Language: Japanese Currently showing [See Japan Times movie listings] When Shinya Tsukamoto released his first feature, "Tetsuo," in 1989, many critics compared the crazed black-and-white speed dream...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / CERAMIC SCENE
Dec 22, 2004

Dreams for a perfectly set table come true

"Everybody sets out to do something, and everybody does something, but no one does what he sets out to do," said Irish author George Moore of the good intentions that abound in life. Setting an idea in motion is often more important than the end result, whether one creates products, ideas, or life itself....
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Dec 16, 2004

Serendipities abound in a wintery wonderland

Recently I spotted a Quetzal from Central America, a Snowy Owl from the Arctic, a Short-tailed Albatross from a remote Pacific island -- and a hovering Skylark. Amazingly they were all together, along with woodpeckers and barbets, thrushes and flycatchers, finches, frigate birds, other albatrosses and...
LIFE / Travel
Dec 14, 2004

Mongolia: Land of yesterday and tomorrow

ULAN BATOR Mongolia has been called "one of the last unspoiled travel destinations in Asia," and, indeed, the traveler feels not only in another country but in another century.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Dec 10, 2004

Getting holy in Wakayama

Since ancient times, pilgrims have ventured into heavily forested mountains in Wakayama Prefecture to visit Koyasan, the headquarters of the Shingon sect of esoteric Buddhism. This is regarded as one of the most sacred places in Japan, lying in an alpine basin at an altitude of about 800 meters, and...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Dec 5, 2004

Way of the corporate giant robot

MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM, by Yoshiyuki Tomino, translated by Frederik L. Schodt with an introduction by Mark Simmons. Stone Bridge Press, 2004, $14.95 (paper). Yoshiyuki "Kill 'em All" Tomino is the mega-prolific creator of the Mobile Suit Gundam phenomenon, known, perhaps a little patronizingly, as the "Star...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / THEN AND NOW
Dec 3, 2004

It's a stroll in a park to find the old Yoyogi

The town of Shinjuku dates from the late 17th century, when a post-station was set up there on the Koshu-kaido on the northwestern edge of Edo (present-day Tokyo). To the south, Yoyogi was then mainly sparsely populated hills that rolled on as far as the eye could see.

Longform

Sumadori Bar on Shibuya Ward's main Center Gai street targets young customers who prefer low-alcohol drinks or abstain altogether.
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