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Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WEEK 3
Jul 20, 2013

On the trail of bear hunters' heritage

Takashi Yoshikawa is no easy man to figure out. Trim and well tanned, the 63-year-old owns a small ryokan (traditional inn) nestled in the foothills of the beautiful Shirakami Mountains which straddle 130,000 hectares of Aomori and Akita prefectures, and whose 17,000 hectares of beech forests were listed...
Reader Mail
Jul 17, 2013

Western work ethic is wanting

In his July 11 letter, "Abnormal way to run a workday," Grant Piper raises a philosophical doctrine that is very Western: We live not to work, but we work to live. Indeed, this supports the utilitarian theories of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, two British philosophers of capitalism who promoted...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 16, 2013

Of spies and whistleblowers

Edward Snowden, a former contractor to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, has been trapped in the transit lounge of Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow for the past two weeks, while the United States government strives mightily to get him back in its clutches. Recently it even arranged for the plane flying...
Japan Times
WORLD
Jul 14, 2013

Somali-American is caught up in U.S. counterpropaganda campaign

Two days after he became a U.S. citizen, Abdiwali Warsame embraced the First Amendment by creating a raucous website about his native Somalia. Packed with news and controversial opinions, it rapidly became a magnet for Somalis dispersed around the world, including tens of thousands in Minnesota.
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Jul 3, 2013

Fed approves rules requiring banks to set aside more capital

The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday ordered banks to set aside more capital as a cushion against losses, bringing the United States in line with developing international standards and opening the door for a set of tougher rules for the nation's biggest financial institutions.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE FOREIGN ELEMENT
Jul 2, 2013

The LDP constitution, article by article: a preview of things to come?

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is pushing for constitutional change. Yet he is playing the political huckster by proposing to first only fiddle with the amendment procedure in Article 96, lowering the threshold for the process to move forward from the approval of two-thirds of both houses of the Diet, as...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 2, 2013

Understanding China's maritime aspirations

China's declaration that it wants to be a sea power and focus on this interest is not sudden. China has long dreamed of becoming a 'maritime civilization.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jun 30, 2013

Charting U.S. decline, without anger

One of the odd things about American news programs is how little American news they feature. Typhoons and hurricanes, crazies and lone gunmen, Barack Obama staging a press conference, 10 seconds about the Middle East, a famous actor doing something scandalous, back to the weather: All this giddy fragmentation...
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health / FOCUS
Jun 26, 2013

Drumming helps those with dementia reconnect

Standing in a room full of lined faces, Alan Yellowitz held up an orange drum shaped like a wineglass. "This one's called a djembe," he said. "It's from Ghana."
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health
Jun 26, 2013

A mother helps son in his struggle with schizophrenia

The mother drives her son everywhere because he is not well enough to drive. He sits next to her, and at the red lights she looks over and studies him: how quiet he is, how stiffly he sits, hands in his lap, fingers fidgeting slightly, a tic that occasionally blooms into a full fluttering motion he makes...
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 24, 2013

Rowhani victory buys time for Iran

Hassan Rowhani's presidential election win has exposed a rift among Iran's democratic forces, yet has bought Tehran time on the nuclear issue.
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Jun 23, 2013

NHK discusses gender with a fresh openness

Two weeks ago, the nightly series "Heart Net TV," which is broadcast on NHK's educational channel, repeated a program about a 35-year-old Japanese man who married a 70-year-old Dutch man in the Netherlands. The series dedicates several programs a month to sexual minorities, and there was a sidelight...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Jun 22, 2013

Old school potter goes native in the wilds of southeast Okinawa

It took a devil of a time before finally managing to locate the home of potter Paul Lorimer, the building tucked into a rural lane on the fringes of the Sashiki community on Okinawa Island's southeast coast.
BUSINESS / Tech
Jun 21, 2013

U.S. government wraps up Apple e-book antitrust trial

The Justice Department on Thursday concluded its antitrust trial against Apple over alleged price-fixing of digital books, with a federal prosecutor saying the creator of the iPhone and iPad engaged in an "old-fashioned, straightforward" conspiracy and Apple's lead attorney warning that a ruling against...
EDITORIALS
Jun 21, 2013

Trying time for Turkish democracy

The unrest in Turkey continues, touched off by a May 31 clash between police forces and protesters opposed to the Turkish government's plan to redevelop Gezi Park in Istanbul. At the root of the unrest is the resistance by people who fear the government is retreating from the principle of secularism....
WORLD / Science & Health
Jun 17, 2013

Open-source software aids NPOs

The Grameen Foundation was providing health care to pregnant women in Ghana in 2010 when it came up with a new idea: As cellphones become more widely available in developing nations, health information can be more quickly disseminated to poor patients in remote locations via voice and text messaging....
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 15, 2013

Is U.S. still the land of the free?

It is not the United Stasi of America. Nevertheless, one still ought to ask how far one can trust the security and law-enforcement complexes to police themselves.
WORLD
Jun 12, 2013

U.S. tech giants urge NSA transparency

Technology companies stung by the controversy over the National Security Agency's sweeping Internet surveillance program are calling on U.S. officials to ease the secrecy surrounding national security investigations and lift long-standing gag orders covering the nature and extent of information collected about Internet users.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE FOREIGN ELEMENT
Jun 11, 2013

Japan's Nigerians see symbol of change in masquerade

Anyone wandering the back streets near Omiya Station at 7:20 a.m. on Sunday, June 2, might have passed a particular office building, unremarkable except for two African men standing on a 2nd floor balcony, rope in hand, lowering a car-sized Ugo (eagle) costume down to the parking lot. One of them was...
Reader Mail
Jun 9, 2013

Conditions for a global education

I read with interest Masaaki Kameda's May 29 article, "Education panel touts more global approach." Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's exhortation that Japanese universities establish super-global universities by recruiting faculty staff from overseas, establishing partnerships with overseas universities and...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE FOREIGN ELEMENT
Jun 4, 2013

As evidence of Agent Orange in Okinawa stacks up, U.S. sticks with blanket denial

In April 2011, these Community pages published the first accounts of sick U.S. veterans who believe their illnesses were caused by exposure to Agent Orange on Okinawa during the Vietnam War era.
COMMUNITY / Issues / JUST BE CAUSE
Jun 4, 2013

By opening up the debate to the real experts, Hashimoto did history a favor

Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto has been busy making headlines around the world with his controversial views on Japan's wartime sex slaves (or "comfort women," for those who like euphemisms with their history). Among other things, he claimed there is no evidence that the Japanese government sponsored the...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Jun 2, 2013

Searching for Mount Fuji

Japan is full of good place names. Who can resist Utsukushigahara (Beautiful Field) in Nagano Prefecture, Ginza (Golden Seat) in Tokyo or the sad irony of Fukushima — Isle of Good Fortune?
Japan Times
JAPAN / NURTURING PARTNERSHIPS
Jun 1, 2013

TICAD's to-do list extensive, 20 years on

Looking back on the Tokyo International Conference on African Development and its achievements over the past 20 years, Masaki Inaba touched on the number of flights that now directly connect Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
Japan Times
WORLD
Jun 1, 2013

Tech elite's wealth sows divisions in San Francisco

Every morning and every evening the fleet glides through the city, hundreds of white buses with tinted windows navigating San Francisco's rush hour. From the pavement you can see your reflection in the windows, but you can't see in. The buses have no markings or logos, no advertised destinations or stops....
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Jun 1, 2013

Ecological disaster looms for rain forests of Sumatra

Our small plane had been flying low over Sumatra for three hours but all we had seen was an industrial landscape of palm and acacia trees stretching 50 km in every direction. A haze of blue smoke from newly cleared land drifted eastward over giant plantations. Long drainage canals dug through equatorial...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Jun 1, 2013

Destroyer of domestic chaos charts way for others to lead organized lives

Jo Ebisujima describes herself as "a hybrid of MacGyver and Martha Stewart."
LIFE / Food & Drink
May 31, 2013

Why it matters where our food comes from

The latest trend in fine dining has nothing to do with molecular gastronomy or pan-Latin fusion: Sustainability is the new order of the day. At the influential World's 50 Best Restaurants awards ceremony in London last month, the organizers presented their first Sustainable Restaurant Award to Narisawa,...
Japan Times
ASIA PACIFIC
May 27, 2013

Sibling spy case spotlights North Korean defectors

Earlier this year, one of the most prominent North Korean defectors, Yoo Woo Sung, walked out of his apartment building in Seoul and found four South Korean government vehicles waiting for him.

Longform

Figure skater Akiko Suzuki was once told her ideal weight should be 47 kilograms, a number she now admits she “naively believed.” This led to her have a relationship with food that resulted in her suffering from anorexia.
The silent battle Japanese athletes fight with weight