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BUSINESS / YEN FOR LIVING
Nov 15, 2011

Fair Trade turns from a movement into a brand

Are products with the Fair Trade logo targeted at certain types of consumers?
EDITORIALS
Nov 6, 2011

Seven billion and counting

The United Nations has identified Danica May Camacho, born just before midnight Oct. 30 in a Philippine hospital, as the 7 billionth inhabitant of our planet. According to the United Nations Population Division, the Earth was to welcome its 7 billionth person on Oct. 31.
LIFE / Digital / TECH_JAPAN
Nov 2, 2011

Preorders keep that 'I-can't-wait-to-play' energy alive

Nov. 11, 2006, was one of the most stressful nights of my gaming life. That was the date the PlayStation 3 launched in Japan — and it was hell.
BUSINESS / YEN FOR LIVING
Oct 30, 2011

Doctors afraid new fee will reduce customers … er, patients

The government wants to add a u00a5100 fee to your medical bills, and doctors are furious.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Oct 30, 2011

Less acclaim, more fun for Japan's Ig Nobel Prize winners

Since Hideki Yukawa in 1949, a total of 16 Japanese nationals have been named recipients of Nobel Prizes. In 2010, when the most recent Japanese winners were announced to receive prizes for chemistry, NHK interrupted its scheduled programming with a nyuusu sokuho (breaking news) announcement.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHO'S WHO
Oct 18, 2011

Greenthumb plants 'kolonihave' seed

Jens Jensen makes almost anything he needs for his weekend life from scratch, from a doorknob to a window frame to a small wooden hut.
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Oct 9, 2011

Television's skewed version of poverty

The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations currently taking place in New York continue to garner more and more attention from the American media, which mostly ignored the movement when it began several weeks ago. Now everybody in America who reads a newspaper or watches TV news understands that the protesters...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Oct 7, 2011

Helping Japan with a dance

Take any teenager nearly 10,000 km (6,000 miles) from home on their first-ever overseas trip and you are bound to reap wonder. For 16-year-old French ballerina Sylvie Guillem, who came to Tokyo with the Paris Opera Ballet School in 1981, that wonder grew into 30 years of mutual admiration.
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Oct 2, 2011

Japan's leaders still don't get it — but whither that 'heretical' 1960s spirit?

Upwards of 2,000 demonstrators clash with riot police. Sections of trains are set alight, the fire spreads into the station and trains don't start running until late in the morning. In the middle of the night, some 450 people are arrested.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 29, 2011

The cute 'n' kooky world of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, Japan's newest pop idol

A recurring theme in the Strange Boutique column has been the question of what has gone wrong with pop music in Japan. Amid discussions of the pernicious influence of advertising agencies, record industry conservatism in the face of declining sales, and the faceless, self-replicating Eurobeat monstrosity...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Sep 25, 2011

Welfare system not faring well

Ten years ago, in her book "Nickel and Dimed," Barbara Ehrenreich chronicled her own experience as a subsistence-level American wage-earner during a period of relative economic vigor. She found a whole class of workers who lived — and would always live — from paycheck to paycheck. In the afterword...
EDITORIALS
Sep 24, 2011

Unrealistic promise on Futenma

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda met with the U.S. President Barack Obama for the first time Wednesday in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. While the two leaders agreed to deepen the alliance between Japan and the United States, Mr. Obama urged Mr. Noda to make serious efforts to ensure...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 23, 2011

In a galaxy not so far away....

"Japanese space engineers could just possibly be the most boring people on the face of the Earth," laughed an aeronautics engineer working for JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), during a brief interview with The Japan Times.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Sep 20, 2011

All Hands brings all sorts to Iwate to aid local recovery

Since April 11, around 770 volunteers from 30 countries have clocked up 42,000 hours cleaning up and repairing in Ofunato, Iwate Prefecture, with U.S.-based NGO All Hands. A partnership with Habitat for Humanity Japan has enabled All Hands to keep this seaside hamlet supplied with a steady influx of...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Sep 17, 2011

Hong Kongers share postdisaster insights

Most Hong Kongers are enthusiastic about Japan — its fashion and pop culture have been popular for years, hundreds of thousands vacation in the country each year, and more of its food is imported there than anywhere else, with fresh sashimi flown in daily from Narita airport.
EDITORIALS
Sep 17, 2011

Accelerate reconstruction

Six months after the massive earthquake and tsunami devastated the Tohoku Pacific coastal areas on March 11, people there are continuing to rebuild together their lives. In Fukushima Prefecture, people have suffered not only from the natural disasters but also from the disaster at Tokyo Electric Power...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WORDS TO LIVE BY
Sep 13, 2011

Eriko Hiratsuka

Eriko Hiratsuka, 26, received her master's degree from Waseda University's Graduate School of Law in 2010. That's no small achievement for anyone, but for Eriko, who has severe hearing loss in both ears, reaching her goals has always required extra effort. Although she can only hear sounds above 80 decibels...
JAPAN
Sep 11, 2011

Not enough whole body counters to go around

The health department in Kashiwa, a city in Chiba Prefecture with multiple radiation hot spots, has received numerous inquiries from worried residents wanting to find out their internal radiation levels.
EDITORIALS
Sep 7, 2011

With record rains comes misery

Typhoon No. 12 (Talas) has brought heavy rains mainly in western Japan. As of the night of Sept. 5, 37 people had died and 54 others were missing. Among the typhoons that hit Japan since 1989, when the Heisei Era started, the latest one caused the second largest number of deaths and missing victims,...
EDITORIALS
Sep 5, 2011

Working holiday anniversary

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the working holiday system in Japan. The program has enabled 20,000 young Japanese a year to live and work abroad, gaining valuable experience and broadening their point of view, but that number should be more. The re-energized attitudes and global outlooks that...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Aug 25, 2011

Red Bull invests in tomorrow's dance-music stars

Thirty-two-year-old Yoshiyuki "Yosi" Horikawa from Ibaraki, Osaka, couldn't believe his eyes when he went online the morning of July 16.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Aug 18, 2011

The Morning Benders

There are lots of summer festivals now. How did you end up deciding to do Summer Sonic?
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Aug 18, 2011

Chili Peppers dominate Summer Sonic

It was clear on the second day of Summer Sonic that this year's event belonged to the evening's headliners Red Hot Chili Peppers. A casual stroll around Chiba's Makuhari Messe complex revealed a noticeable uptick from the day before in the number of shirtless dudes sporting tribal-band tattoos.
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Aug 14, 2011

Barriers to multiculturalism are as low as they've ever been in Japan

Second of two parts
EDITORIALS
Aug 10, 2011

Pension collection rates falling

The premium-collection rate for the basic pension (kokumin nenkin) for fiscal 2010 was 59.3 percent, down from fiscal 2009's 59.98 percent and a record low. The rate has fallen below 60 percent for two consecutive years and has continued to tumble for five straight years.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Aug 7, 2011

Tadanori Yokoo: An artist by design

In conversation, Tadanori Yokoo jumps nimbly between the past and the present. One moment he's watching the sky glow red as bombs rain down on Kobe during World War II. The next he's riding in a taxi with Yukio Mishima. And then he's back in the present, here at his studio in Tokyo's Setagaya Ward, discussing...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jul 31, 2011

Timely film reiterates the 'no nukes' urgings of Barefoot Gen's creator

"Nothing has changed from the time of the atom bombs. ... It stands to reason that people are terrified of what they cannot see. I understand the hysteria. In the end, humans must not resort to the atom that they cannot control. The time has come for the Japanese people to make up their mind."
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jul 30, 2011

Gelato master in Kamakura serves it the old-fashioned way

According to Japanese popular wisdom, no matter how small your project or enterprise is, if it's really good people will eventually take notice.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WORDS TO LIVE BY
Jul 26, 2011

Chair of the Japanese Association for Suicide Prevention Yukio Saito

Yukio Saito, 75, is the Chair of the Japanese Association for Suicide Prevention and CEO of the Japanese Federation of Inochi-no-denwa (Lifeline), Japan's first and largest telephone counseling service. For the past five decades, Saito has been educating the public and lobbying relentlessly to bring...
EDITORIALS
Jul 20, 2011

3/11 victims face welfare cuts

Cases have surfaced in which municipalities in Tohoku have stopped welfare payments to victims of the March 11 earthquake-tsunami and subsequent nuclear crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

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