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CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jul 17, 2005

There's nothing quite like a good Indian argument

THE ARGUMENTATIVE INDIAN: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity, by Amartya Sen. Penguin, 2005, 356 pp., £25 (cloth). "We do like to speak," admits Amartya Sen, citing a well-known fact about Indians in the opening paragraph of "The Argumentative Indian." But what the Nobel Prize-winning...
Japan Times
Features / WEEK 3
Jul 17, 2005

Dining where no solo woman dared

Reiko Yuyama believes that adventures are there to be had in daily life without having to go out into the wilderness. In that sense, she says she might be "more of an adventurer than Christopher Columbus or Naomi Uemura," the late, great Japanese explorer and climber who disappeared on Mount McKinley...
JAPAN
Jul 16, 2005

Narita to extend runway northward

Narita International Airport's "interim" 2,180-meter second runway will be extended to the north to its full length of 2,500 meters instead of to the south as originally planned because landowners refused to budge, the operator said Friday.
MORE SPORTS
Jul 15, 2005

Tomizawa tosses Japan past Hawaiian squad at Tokyo Dome

Yuichi Tomizawa threw a 25-yard touchdown pass to Takao Mizuguchi for the winning score with 1:34 to play Thursday, leading Team Japan to a 20-16 come-from-behind triumph over Team USA-Hawaii in the Japan-USA Bowl 2005.
JAPAN
Jul 14, 2005

Koizumi confident as postal bills hit last stage

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said Wednesday he is confident his contentious package of postal privatization bills won't be rejected by the House of Councilors and there will be no need to dissolve the House of Representatives.
COMMENTARY
Jul 14, 2005

Unraveling motives of terror

LONDON -- After months of careful planning, it has been the turn of London to suffer the carnage already familiar to the people of Madrid, Jakarta, Casablanca, Riyadh, Istanbul, New York (although not on the same scale) and many other world cities.
JAPAN
Jul 14, 2005

Lawyers stand firm, boycott refugee appeal hearings

A group of lawyers representing refugee applicants began boycotting appeals hearings Wednesday as promised, after the Justice Ministry's Immigration Bureau rejected their requests for greater information disclosure.
JAPAN
Jul 13, 2005

Rice again warns North

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday that upcoming six-party talks to end North Korea's nuclear threat will fail unless Pyongyang indicates it is willing to abandon its nuclear weapons.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jul 13, 2005

You've never seen anything so ancient Chinese like this in Tokyo

Tokyo's Mori Art Museum is currently hosting one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of Chinese artifacts that has ever been held in Japan. "China: Crossroads of Culture" is an incredible amalgam of treasures and art objects from the entire first millennium of Chinese history, beginning with pieces...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 13, 2005

Nepal backs Japan UNSC bid, but not G4

Nepal backs Japan's bid to become a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council but has yet to decide whether to support a resolution on UNSC expansion Tokyo jointly submitted with Germany, Brazil and India, visiting Nepalese Foreign Minister Ramesh Nath Pandey said.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Jul 13, 2005

Interesting times in China

Chinese contemporary art made a splash in the late 1990s with the so-called Mao Goes Pop movement, which broke big among Western gallerygoers and collectors.
COMMUNITY / LIFELINES
Jul 12, 2005

Food tips, bad bikers and buffets

Food for thought On the subject of foreign food in Japan, Mike writes in to recommend the Flying Pig ( www.theflyingpig.com ).
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Jul 12, 2005

A fight to the death

Her bony, 80-year-old body floating around inside a nylon shirt and cigarette permanently clamped between what appear to be her two remaining front teeth, Kan Kyon Nam is an unlikely illegal squatter.
COMMENTARY
Jul 12, 2005

A skittish reform pendulum

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's postal privatization bills cleared the Lower House on July 5 by only five votes, demonstrating the strength of anti-Koizumi forces in the governing Liberal Democratic Party. The narrow margin reflected severe criticism of not only the legislation but also Koizumi's...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jul 10, 2005

Where Zen is perfectly at home

ZEN AND KYOTO, by John Einarsen. Uniplan Co., Inc, 2004, 135 pp., 2,381 yen (paper). Like heaven and hell, or the elements of earth and rock, Zen and the city of Kyoto are joined at the hip.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jul 10, 2005

Coming out of the linguistic closet

QUEER JAPAN FROM THE PACIFIC WAR TO THE INTERNET AGE, by Mark McLelland. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005, 248 pp., 15 b/w photos, $34.95 (paper). Japanese homosexuals face a peculiar problem. There is a true confusion among terms for sex, gender, sexual orientation, and gender expression. As one scholar...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Jul 9, 2005

Japan -- where the oldies are always golden

That pitter-patter you hear right now is probably only the remains of the rainy season slipping drop by drop from your eave spouts. Yet there is another melancholy drizzle in this land that falls all year round. It is that misty-eyed drool for all things past. Yes, this country is literally dripping...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Jul 9, 2005

Umibiraki -- drunk fish, a certain charm

On the first Sunday of July for hundreds of years now, a priest has performed a Shinto ceremony called umibiraki on Shiraishi Island. At this "opening-of-the-sea" ceremony, the priest blesses the sea making it safe for swimming.
COMMENTARY
Jul 9, 2005

Blair pinpoints EU challenges

LONDON -- In his speech to the European Parliament in Brussels on June 23, British Prime Minister Tony Blair set out in stark terms the main challenges facing Europe (and in different ways perhaps, the United States and Japan) from China and India.
COMMUNITY
Jul 9, 2005

Humanitarian paints hope for students of Vietnam

Fred Harris looks around the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Yurakucho, central Tokyo, and observes with his usual keen but fond eye, "This was the first club I joined when I came here in 1964." (He was also in Japan while serving as a U.S. soldier during the Korean War.)
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music / THE SECOND ROOM
Jul 9, 2005

Five signs of the coming Golden Age of trance

In the fast and chaotic protoculture growing around psychedelic trance in Japan, it is often difficult at best and futile at worst to try to get a genuine fix on the direction in which we are headed.
JAPAN
Jul 7, 2005

IPS exec urges news agencies to find new roles in Internet age

The Internet has upset the monopolies on communication and information traditionally enjoyed by major news organizations, and news agencies must define their roles in this new environment, according to Mario Lubetkin, director general of global news agency Inter Press Service.
JAPAN
Jul 7, 2005

Student nabbed in data theft on 520,000 people

A 27-year-old Chinese man has been arrested for allegedly stealing data on individuals from a computer server of a Tokyo travel agency in March, the Metropolitan Police Department said Wednesday, adding credit card data were among the information taken.

Longform

Dangami House is a 180-year-old former samurai residence of the Kato clan, who ruled over Ozu, Ehime Prefecture, until the Meiji Restoration.
A house, a legacy and the quiet work of restoration in rural Japan