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Japan Times
ASIA PACIFIC / Politics
Mar 7, 2014

Modi to take on Congress in polls

Street clashes erupted in India after this week's announcement that parliamentary elections will start April 7 in a race that pits Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi against the unpopular Nehru-Gandhi family's ruling party.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 6, 2014

Live-action Ghibli remake delivers a new Kiki

When is a remake not a remake? Arguably, Takashi Shimizu's "Majo no Takkyubin (Kiki's Delivery Service)" is less a reworking of the Hayao Miyazaki animation classic (which this reviewer praised on this page in 1989) than his own interpretation of the 1985 Eiko Kadono fantasy novel on which the Miyazaki...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Mar 5, 2014

Nomura's 'Don Quixote' enlists comedy to counter today's real foes

"Whenever I am creating a new play here at Setagaya Public Theatre, I aim for something that's as universal as all those kyōgen (traditional comic theater) or noh classics that are as vivid now as when they were first staged 600 years ago. If it isn't like that, it won't reach an international audience,...
EDITORIALS
Mar 4, 2014

Nigeria shoots the messenger

It's no surprise that there has been an outflow of currency from Nigeria ever since the central bank governor was suspended days after he blew the whistle on $20 billion in missing oil revenues.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 3, 2014

China fights dragon of credit-allocation reform

China needs to reforming the credit-allocation mechanism to provide more capital to well-performing projects and enforce hard budget constraints on poor-performing borrowers.
Japan Times
WORLD / Politics / ANALYSIS
Mar 2, 2014

Moscow keeps ex-Soviet states firmly in line

Russian President Vladimir Putin's ex post facto request to use military forces in Ukraine should not really have come as a surprise. The big question is: What does he want?
Japan Times
WORLD
Mar 2, 2014

Hundreds in Hong Kong protest meat cleaver attack on journalist

Hundreds of people took to Hong Kong's streets to show support for press freedom and to demand police step up efforts to catch the assailants who critically injured the former chief editor of a newspaper in the city.
Japan Times
JAPAN / GENERATIONAL CHANGE
Mar 2, 2014

Composer Shibuya tests limits of music

One November evening in Paris, Theatre du Chatelet was packed with people who came to see the French premiere of a new opera by a Japanese composer.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 27, 2014

The truth, like porn, can be seen from many angles

"Lovelace" is a biopic on the 1970s porn superstar Linda Lovelace (real name: Linda Boreman), who rose to fame in "Deep Throat," the low-budget hardcore sex comedy that went on to gross something like $600 million. Its story is based almost entirely on "Ordeal," Boreman's 1980 account of her career in...
Japan Times
WORLD
Feb 23, 2014

Shambolic Venezuela's biggest threat? Itself.

Late President Hugo Chavez used to call it "la revolucion bonita" (the pretty revolution), but the world looked at Venezuela last week and saw only ugliness. Protesters gunned down in the streets, barricades in flames, chaos. One of the dead was a 22-year-old beauty queen shot in the head.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / BACKSTREET STORIES
Feb 22, 2014

Arisugawa-no-Miya's no mere people's park

Tokyo's weather in February is unpredictable, so when the day I have set aside for exploring features a record-breaking blizzard, I'm not surprised. So, bundled up like Everest conqueror Edmund Hillary, I exit Hiroo Station in Minato Ward to find the air feathered with swirling flakes and the streets...
Japan Times
OLYMPICS / ICE TIME
Feb 21, 2014

Scandalous outcome: Skating judges steal Kim's title, hand it to Sotnikova

Yuna Kim got robbed on Thursday night. Plain and simple.
COMMENTARY
Feb 20, 2014

Legacy of carnage and ruin

This is probably, but not certainly, the year that sees the end to the United States' three-decades-long effort to establish permanent American strategic bases in the Muslim Middle East and in Muslim Asia.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Feb 19, 2014

ABT brings 'magical moments' to Japan

Last August, with summer sweltering the city, I met Yuriko Kajiya and Jared Matthews, two soloists from the New York-based American Ballet Theatre, one of the word's top-four classical companies along with the Royal Ballet in London, Paris Opera Ballet and the Bolshoi in Moscow.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 19, 2014

Ryuichi Kakurezaki: on clay and legends

It's not easy to make profound changes in a ceramic style that has a 1,000-year history. Take, for instance, the style known as Bizen. Bizen pottery is one of Japan's most celebrated high-fired unglazed ceramic styles, and continues to be so to this very day. Forms that started with farmers' needs in...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Feb 18, 2014

Ska innovator gets new acts on Spacetrain

Ray Charles was the innovator of soul. Rei Mastrogiovanni wants to innovate ska; he says it's in his blood.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Feb 15, 2014

'The Fed' closing an end of an era

Of the many Western-style hotels that mushroomed across Bangkok in the 1960s, principally to accommodate large numbers of U.S. servicemen on leave from the Vietnam War (which was raging about 1,000 km to the east), the Federal Hotel was considered the granddaddy of them all.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Feb 14, 2014

Drift rightward has been building for years

Fashion model Junko Amo made headlines on Aug. 15, 2002, when she initiated a visit to controversial Yasukuni Shrine with a group of some 180 people she met via 2channel, Japan's biggest Internet forum.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 11, 2014

Big money backs wrong man in India

There is a great, virtual storm blowing through India today to make Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, seem like the nation's natural and inevitable leader.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 9, 2014

Mexico's reformer Pena Nieto can't quit Castro

It isn't clear what Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto gains by ignoring the reality that Cuba has no elections, no political parties, no free press or freedom of expression, and that dissidents are harassed and jailed.

Longform

After pandemic-era border regulations eased, Indian migrants began returning to Japan. Their population now stands at more than 50,000 across the country.
How remote work is rewriting the migrant experience in Japan