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Japan Times
JAPAN
May 11, 2013

Universities lure students with upscale dorms

Universities in Japan are doing everything they can to attract students amid the aging society and decline in young people.
Japan Times
JAPAN / EXPLAINER
May 8, 2013

Spring fever hits workers, students hard after Golden Week

It's now a month since freshmen, finally freed from the stressful life of studying to pass rigorous university entrance exams, began their new lives at their new schools.
Reader Mail
May 2, 2013

Let go of the sorrow and anger

If China or South Korea were asked not to visit a place or do something it had been used to doing for years, I am sure the answer would be "this is our country and you have no right to interfere, so just stay away." And they would be right.
Japan Times
WORLD / Crime & Legal
May 1, 2013

A most dangerous spy

Ana Montes has been locked up for a decade with some of the most frightening women in America. Once a highly decorated U.S. intelligence analyst with a two-bedroom co-op in Washington, Montes today lives in a two-bunk cell in the highest-security women's prison in the nation.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Entertainment news
Apr 13, 2013

How keeping it real took Matt Damon to the top

In 1987, when Bruce Springsteen wrote the song "Ain't Got You," he was the biggest rock star in the world. He had vast estates in New Jersey and Beverly Hills, and he had not long returned from a honeymoon at Gianni Versace's villa in Lake Como. "Ain't Got You" was Springsteen's attempt to make a self-aware...
CULTURE / Stage
Apr 9, 2013

'Natch' gets ghostly on stage

"If I thought too much about my future plans, I would kind of get stuck," says Natsumi Abe. "So I just try to concentrate on the next day's work and do it as well as I can."
CULTURE / Books
Apr 7, 2013

Processing the bitter to a durable, beautiful form

KICKING THE BLACK MAMBA: Life, Alcohol and Death, by Robert Anthony Welch. Darton, Longman and Todd, 2012, 240 pp., £12.99 (paperback)
Reader Mail
Apr 4, 2013

Where does human respect live?

Regarding Thomas Clark's March 28 letter, "Review of the Easter message": Clark would do well to take a look at the world he lives in rather than filtering his experience through the stained glass of dogma. It seems that all the places where human rights are well-respected and the quality of life is...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE FOREIGN ELEMENT
Apr 2, 2013

A tale of two knives, a Kiwi legend, a gang and a girl

The story reads like a New Zealand news editor's wish list: Celebrity, dangerous weapons, bizarre behavior, death threats, Brazilian street gangs and a mysterious love interest.
Japan Times
WORLD / Society
Apr 1, 2013

Visa program for investors gains traction

Sitting around the long, wooden kitchen table in their farmhouse on a Sunday afternoon, Rene and Judith Dekker were tired-eyed from rising before dawn to tend to their 1,200 dairy cows.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 29, 2013

Documenting the Vogels as they give the gift of art

As far as art collectors Herb and Dorothy Vogel were concerned, Megumi Sasaki was more than a filmmaker who turned their lives into an award-winning documentary ("Herb & Dorothy," 2009): She's a close friend and a daughter. Having never had (or apparently even desired) children, the Vogels were by all...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Mar 23, 2013

Photography buff behind Japan Camera Hunter thrives in Tokyo, the capital of cameras

Bellamy Hunt's name is part of his business: Japan Camera Hunter, a one-man enterprise supporting film photo buffs around Asia and the world. His work mainly involves hunting down vintage cameras, whether an elusive early model Nikon or a classic Leica.
Reader Mail
Mar 21, 2013

Honorable human destination

Robert McKinney is an intelligent man. If he wasn't, then he would not be able to write as well as he does, and he does write well. But Jennifer Kim writes well also, and her March 17 response to his March 14 letter is a spot-on critique.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Mar 11, 2013

Unable to return, Futaba residents fear becoming lost tribe

Makiyasu Matsumoto, 82, worries he may never be able to return to his hometown of Futaba, which was rendered uninhabitable by the wrecked Fukushima No. 1 power plant.
Japan Times
WORLD / Society
Mar 9, 2013

'Kony2012' and the fight for truth in the Internet age

A year ago, Jason Russell was a nobody. Not a nobody, precisely, but just ordinary. Normal. He was a healthy father of two, living in San Diego, and was happy in his work as a director for Invisible Children, a nonprofit organization he'd helped found.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Mar 6, 2013

Awakening the desire for a home with personality

Bored with run-of-the-mill suburban Japanese apartments? Perhaps putting the grand piano in the center of the living room would improve the situation.
JAPAN / Media / DARK SIDE OF THE RISING SUN
Mar 3, 2013

Say goodbye to the Buddha of the yakuza

Takahiko Inoue, yakuza boss and Buddhist priest, died Feb. 10 at age 65. The police determined that he fell from the seventh story of the building where his office was located. When the ambulance arrived, Inoue told the crew: "I'm fine. Just take me to the hospital. I'll walk to the car myself." Those...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Feb 24, 2013

Osaka: Japan's latterday second city forever breaks the national mold

They're funny, finicky and feisty, not to mention being full of wicked mischief, with their own way of talking, too. Outside of Japan, think of Liverpool, not London; or Munich, not Berlin; or Mumbai, not Delhi. I'm talking about the people of Osaka.
EDITORIALS
Feb 24, 2013

Sportsmanship gone awry

Details of the brutal physical and verbal abuse by the basketball coach of an Osaka high school boy who committed suicide have finally been released. The external independent panel found that coach Hajime Komura repeatedly and consistently used corporal punishment and verbal abuse on the boy before the...
Japan Times
LIFE
Feb 24, 2013

Sharing films with a master critic

Donald Richie was my friend and mentor for more than 20 years and my inspiration before that. When I was preparing to come to Japan for the first time in 1975, I read many books about the place, but Donald's masterpiece "The Inland Sea" was the one that entranced me. My first long trip after my arrival...
Japan Times
WORLD / Crime & Legal
Feb 23, 2013

The stalking cure: rehabilitating an all too common menace

When forensic psychiatrist Frank Farnham first meets a stalker, he doesn't judge. Some of his clients have done awful things. They have intimidated, pursued and terrified their victims.
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
Feb 17, 2013

Tracing time's passing through faces of Tokyo

Petri Artturi Asikainen would regularly accost strangers in Tokyo, on the streets, in parks or bars and on trains. With a high-end Nikon D3 digital SLR in his hands, the lanky and bespectacled Finn would ask — somewhat timidly summoning one of the few Japanese phrases he had memorized: "Can I take...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Feb 17, 2013

Hiding from strangers in the global village

In his 1993 novel "Hanauzumi," Junichi Watanabe pictures a prosperous farming village in Saitama. The year is 1868. The Meiji Restoration has just occurred. The shogun has been overthrown. The teenage Emperor Meiji has been conveyed from the ancient imperial capital of Kyoto and installed in Tokyo. Great...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 7, 2013

Tadasu Takamine's not so 'Cool Japan'

In May 2011, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry promoted the idea of "Cool Japan," presenting Japanese culture as a product amid the confusing circumstances after the Great East Japan Earthquake. As Japan continues to suffer a declining population and weak economy, it was a government attempt...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 31, 2013

Seeing the wood for Enku's Buddhas

While a golden age for secular arts, Japan's Edo Period (1603-1867) is broadly dismissed by art historians as a period of stagnation for Buddhist sculpture.
Japan Times
WORLD
Jan 28, 2013

The first family: ordinary yet extraordinary

As President Barack Obama took the stage to deliver his acceptance speech on the night of his re-election, his younger daughter nudged his arm. He bent down to listen to 11-year-old Sasha. "Behind you," she mouthed. The president nodded and promptly turned to wave to the supporters at his back. Sasha...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WORDS TO LIVE BY
Jan 22, 2013

Rag-and-bone man Kei Ochiai

Kei Ochiai is a rag-and-bone man for the Kanto region. He drives his small truck through neighborhoods in Tokyo and Yokohama, circling the areas while sounding his pitch with a loudspeaker: "Furniture, bikes, fridges, anything big and heavy, I'll take it." His jovial demeanor instantly wins him hearts...
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Jan 19, 2013

Why spider's silk is becoming man's best friend

Up on the roof of professor Fritz Vollrath's lab in the zoology department at Oxford University, there is a makeshift greenhouse in which he nurtures his favorite golden orb web spiders. Walking into the greenhouse is a little like finding yourself inside one of those Damien Hirst vitrines that dramatize...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jan 13, 2013

Beate Sirota Gordon: An American to whom Japan remains indebted

Beate Sirota Gordon passed away on Dec. 30. She was 89.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 12, 2013

Failures of governance spawned the rape crisis

The shock waves from the pack-rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in New Delhi continue to reverberate in India and around the world. The pathology of rape is not rooted in local culture. A nation does not rise in collective revulsion at normal but rather at unacceptable behavior.

Longform

Japan's growing ranks of centenarians are redefining what it means to live in a super-aging society.
What comes after 100?