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LIFE / Style & Design
Feb 3, 2000

Clues to health are at your fingertips

In the West, there is a general acknowledgment that the appearance of one's nails can reflect the state of one's health, but in many Eastern medical traditions the nails are used quite directly in the diagnosis. Despite their role as protective shields for the fingertips, nails are actually more sensitive...
COMMUNITY / How-tos
Feb 2, 2000

Maintaining traditions

A gentleman is doing research on fireflies and asks about a service that provides fireflies for parties. He tells us he lives on a small hill surrounded by trees with a huge expanse of rice fields below. Ideal for fireflies, he says, but they are exceedingly rare; his son has seen more on a single night...
EDITORIALS
Jan 30, 2000

Emperors of the rag trade

"Haute couture" -- high fashion -- has long been good for a laugh. One of the best therapies for gloom in Tokyo is to stroll along the southeastern end of Omotesando, in Aoyama, where the fashion boutiques cluster. The prison-block architecture (rain-streaked cement tastefully accessorized with rust)...
JAPAN
Jan 28, 2000

TV exec held for threats to 'beautician'

Former Fuji TV producer Koichi Ishimoto, 45, has been arrested for allegedly trying to extort 300 million yen from a beautician who once appeared on his television program, police said. Two others, including Takashi Teruyama, 42, who describes himself as a representative of a political organization,...
CULTURE / Music
Jan 25, 2000

One up from the real roots: no hoke from this folk singer

The most compelling, expressive and soulful instrument of all is the human voice. Outside the world of Western music, there are many vocalists who have the ability to capture a certain indefinable sense of yearning. Voices with a fiery beauty and explosive power; intimate, haunting, ageless, mysterious....
COMMUNITY
Jan 19, 2000

Lafcadio Hearn: interpreter of two disparate worlds

He created an illusion and lived his days and nights within its confines. That illusion was his Japan. He found in Japan the ideal coupling of the cerebral and the sensual, mingled and indistinguishable, the one constantly recharging the other and affording him the inspiration to write.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Jan 19, 2000

Um, you know, like, how to be fluent in Japanese

Lots of people think one sure way to improve your Nihongo skills is to marry a Japanese. They hold this view even knowing a good textbook is cheaper and takes up less space. In my case, however, not only did I marry a Japanese, I married one licensed to teach her native tongue.
COMMUNITY / How-tos
Jan 19, 2000

New opportunities

I have a letter from a 15-year-old girl in Germany. She has blue-gray eyes and dark blond hair. She speaks English, French and German. She tells me of her school and her hobbies. She has a cat called Blacky. She is looking for pen-friends in Japan.
JAPAN
Jan 18, 2000

Navajo fights relocation, sees coal interests at work

Staff writer An American Indian recently visited Japan to solicit support for the Dineh people, also known as the Navajo, facing relocation from their home in the Big Mountain area of northern Arizona. Lecturing in English and saying a prayer in his native tongue, Bahe Yazzie Katenay, 42, spoke about...
COMMUNITY / How-tos
Jan 16, 2000

Effective action

Now I know how we can rid our cities of crows. I have a wooded area behind my apartment where they gather to caw about their day, and all morning they have been especially raucous as they settle there for a short rest before taking off on another forage. Then suddenly, quiet. I looked up from my desk...
JAPAN
Jan 4, 2000

India hijacking victim returns to Japan

A Japanese woman who was held for eight days aboard a hijacked Indian airliner in December returned to Japan on Tuesday, four days after her release. Chiaki Hisada, 30, arrived at Narita Airport aboard a Japan Airlines plane from New Delhi with her family, who had flown to India to join her. Hisada...
JAPAN
Dec 22, 1999

Walking Queen contestants take pride in stride

Staff writer Chest out, stomach in! Forget that chic Private Label suit, the 20-cm platform boots, cowgirl hat or bleached hair. If you want to truly express yourself, take pride in how you regulate your gait. That was the message sent out at the '99 International Walking Contest held last Sunday at...
ENVIRONMENT / GARDENING FOR ALL
Dec 22, 1999

Getting away from it all on Izu's Big Island

Ura-Izu-Oshima Part 1
JAPAN
Dec 9, 1999

U.K. envoy upbeat on ties

Staff writer What a difference a decade makes. In 1990, BBC television aired a documentary series that chronicled Japan's economic miracle. In January, it will air a followup series examining the nation's economic demise, titled "Bubble Trouble." A contrasting, yet perhaps an even more insightful British...
CULTURE / Music
Dec 5, 1999

Mellow, smooth and clear -- classical orchestras fill a niche

Chamber orchestras vary in size, just as people do. A chamber orchestra may comprise as few as 13 (the smallest number that can sound like an orchestra) or as many as 20 string players, plus winds. A symphony orchestra usually musters a string body ranging upward from, say, 35 string players.
CULTURE / Art
Dec 4, 1999

Folk painting from roadside to museum

The world of the minga, "folk painting," is one of subtle beauty created by the countless unknown artists who draw on rich crafts traditions for inspiration. The end result of these unknown artists is refreshingly simple, unaffected works of art. Opportunities to view the work of these unheralded artists...
CULTURE / Art
Dec 4, 1999

Exorcising demons of relentlessly passing time

Miyako Ishiuchi underwent an experience in her late 20s that was, if not entirely unique, certainly highly unusual: She became entranced with photography because of its smell.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Nov 28, 1999

Work full-time and raise a bonsai? No thanks

The other day I mentioned to my husband that I might like to take a class in growing bonsai trees. I don't even know why I mentioned it. I had been growing some pretty good mold in the bathroom and refrigerator so perhaps it seemed like a good time to move on to something more challenging.
CULTURE / Books
Nov 24, 1999

Ghostly tanka with a steely brightness

HEAVENLY MAIDEN: Tanka, by Akiko Baba, translated by Hatsue Kawamura and Jane Reichhold. AHA Books, 1999; 115 pp., $10. More expressive than the briefer haiku, tanka can more easily incorporate the flow of events and thoughts that make up ordinary life:
ENVIRONMENT / GARDENING FOR ALL
Nov 24, 1999

A mountainous garden undertaking for all

Rikugien in Tokyo is the last in this series on gardens built in old Edo (modern Tokyo) by daimyo under the Tokugawa military government (bakufu) between 1603 and 1868.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Nov 24, 1999

Gilded lilies of the Tokugawas

EDO: ART IN JAPAN 1615-1868. Edited by Robert Singer, foreword by Earl A. Powell III. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, with assistance from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs and the Japan Foundation. 480 pp., 281 color plates. Unpriced. THE EYES...
CULTURE / Art
Nov 20, 1999

Something in the air of Japan's 'Deep South'

They were known as the "girlie photographers," dozens of young female photographers who elbowed their way through the society of cameramen to rise to prominence in Japan during the early 1990s. And as the media loves an underdog, critics loved so-called onnanoko shashinka.
CULTURE / Books
Nov 17, 1999

An 'overseas Vietnamese' goes home

CATFISH AND MANDALA: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, by Andrew X. Pham. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999; 344 pp., $25. After Vietnam's "American War" ended, the victorious Viet Cong captured and imprisoned Andrew X. Pham and his family as, along with scores...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Nov 17, 1999

Hemingway's dead; long live the future

Hemingway once said that good writing begins with the simple production of but one true sentence. OK. Here's something that's true. Hemingway is dead.
CULTURE / Art / CERAMIC SCENE
Nov 13, 1999

Giving away an old secret favorite

I'm not so sure that I want to tell you about this wonderful Mino potter who's having an exhibition in Tokyo next week. It's like spreading the word about your favorite restaurant, and you can never seem to get a reservation thereafter.
COMMUNITY
Nov 10, 1999

Walking the way of the gods

As long as there has been Japan there has been Shinto: the "way of the gods." Shintoism is not organized around any central religious text or authority. It is perhaps best described as an amalgam of thousands of local deities (kami) and beliefs observed within a base framework of rituals and customs....
LIFE / Travel
Nov 3, 1999

Autumn leaves and legends of Kyushu's farthest mountains

GOKANOSHO, Kumamoto Pref. -- The tiny community of Gokanosho (made up of five hamlets, hence its name) is virtually in the center of Kyushu. Draw an imaginary semicircle arching inland from the Kumamoto-Hitoyoshi expressway, and Gokanosho will be in the middle.
CULTURE / Music / FUZZY LOGIC
Nov 2, 1999

Mosh mosh! Where have the punk girls disappeared to?

Hiroko is a smart TV tarento and it's her birthday so I've got a big treat in store for her: I've rustled up a pair of guest passes for a sold-out Guitar Wolf gig.
COMMUNITY / How-tos / GETTING THINGS DONE
Oct 31, 1999

When there's a need

What is KEEP? a reader asks. Friends in the United States want to know about its activities before making a donation.
LIFE / Travel
Oct 20, 1999

Apimondia: all abuzz about bees

The white sails of the Vancouver Trade and Convention Center were a beehive of activity Sept. 12 to 18, as nearly 3,000 scientists and beekeepers from around the world converged in Vancouver for a huge international beekeeping congress.

Longform

A sinkhole in Yashio, which emerged in January, was triggered by a ruptured, aging sewer pipe. Authorities worry that similar sections of infrastructure across the country are also at risk of corrosion.
That sinking feeling: Japan’s aging sewers are an infrastructure time bomb