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Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
May 25, 2006

Incidentally Capturing the city

Berlin is not beautiful like Paris, rich like London, or charming like Amsterdam. Prewar buildings in the German capital are pockmarked by bullet holes, while postwar architecture testifies to the city's division due to the Cold War -- American, British and French sectors were restored or rebuilt, the...
COMMENTARY / World
May 10, 2006

North-South fault line in global politics

On April 28 developing countries voted as a group at the United Nations to shelve management reforms proposed by Secretary General Kofi Annan in the wake of the oil-for-food scandal. Annan had requested more discretion and latitude in hiring, shifting and firing his staff, and controlling the organization's...
COMMENTARY / World
May 8, 2006

Japan's 'strategy' criticized

Most of the Southeast Asian intellectuals and lawmakers I met with recently while visiting the region made remarks critical of Japan's regional strategies. Some said Japan was unenthusiastic about negotiations on economic cooperation with Southeast Asian countries and instead was giving priority to solving...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Apr 23, 2006

'Folkways' school ban puts 'stateways' to democratic test

The essential argument about how to create a democratic society that is tolerant of difference revolves around an old and simple question: Do stateways make folkways?
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Apr 9, 2006

Could the U.N. have done more?

A NOT SO DISTANT HORROR: Mass Violence in East Timor, by Joseph Nevins. New York: Cornell University Press, 2005, 273 pp., $18.95 (cloth). This is a gripping and powerful saga rooted in the horrible atrocities and deprivation endured by the East Timorese following Indonesia's invasion in 1975. Indonesian...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Apr 8, 2006

Mary Kerwin

Born the eldest of five sisters in Minneapolis, Mary Kerwin said that superficially hers was an insular upbringing. Her grandfather was an immigrant from Norway. Her father was a Lutheran pastor and her mother a schoolteacher. "But while I was still very young, the Viking ancestry won out," she said....
Japan Times
JAPAN
Mar 30, 2006

Marines find hope in new diplomatic tool: English

URUMA, Okinawa Pref. -- At first glance, it looks like the typical English conversation school found throughout Japan -- students armed with pencils and notebooks listening to a Western instructor drill them in grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation.
EDITORIALS
Mar 26, 2006

A fair ruling in Britain

In most legal rulings, even a casual observer can see reasonable arguments on both sides. This is not surprising. If both sides didn't have reasonable arguments, there wouldn't be a dispute to begin with, or any need for a ruling. But a decision handed down by Britain's Law Lords last week backing a...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 20, 2006

Colonization obstructs peace

PLAINS, Georgia -- For more than a quarter century, Israeli policy has been in conflict with that of the United States and the international community. Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory has obstructed a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land, regardless of whether Palestinians had...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Mar 17, 2006

Drop base plan: Iwakuni mayor

Iwakuni Mayor Katsusuke Ihara urged Tokyo again Thursday to withdraw the planned relocation of U.S. carrier-borne aircraft to his city after a majority of residents voted "no" on the move in a plebiscite Sunday.
JAPAN
Mar 9, 2006

Soccer lottery ticket seller betting it can reverse fortunes

The National Agency for the Advancement of Sports and Health, an independent administrative corporation that sells soccer lottery tickets, has its back against the wall due to sluggish sales and hopes to sow the seeds of recovery in the next fiscal year.
JAPAN
Feb 21, 2006

Child killings cast light on isolated foreign moms

The arrest of a Chinese woman in Friday's fatal stabbing of two children she routinely drove to kindergarten in Nagahama, Shiga Prefecture, has cast a light on the problems foreigners face in trying to fit into Japanese society.
JAPAN
Feb 11, 2006

Kansai business leaders get political

KYOTO -- A key annual gathering of senior business leaders in the Kansai region ended Friday with calls to improve relations with China and South Korea and to create an East Asian economic bloc.
JAPAN
Feb 10, 2006

Politics loom at Kansai business meet

KYOTO -- The 44th annual Kansai Economic Seminar began in Kyoto Thursday, but in the opening speeches and plenary sessions, social and political concerns instead of economic issues received the lion's share of attention.
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Feb 10, 2006

Shaping 'neo-classic' cuisine

It is a measure of Tokyo's hidden depths that many of its top restaurants remain so little known, at least among the city's expatriate population. That is certainly the case with L'Osier. Founded in 1973, it established its heavyweight reputation under French master chef Jacques Borie, winning a devoted...
EDITORIALS
Feb 9, 2006

Iran tests the United Nations

Iran seems intent on confronting the world. Remarkably, the international community has mustered a unified response to the Tehran government's seeming determination to build a nuclear weapon. But brinkmanship continues: Last weekend Tehran said it was ending its commitment to the Additional Protocol...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Feb 7, 2006

Twisted legal logic deals rights blow to foreigners

Steve McGowan, an African-American resident of Kyoto, sued an eyeglass shop in Daito City, Osaka Prefecture, for refusing him entry in 2004 on the basis of the color of his skin.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Feb 5, 2006

Fashionista with attitude

Raised on the mean streets of Brooklyn's Brownsville district, Gene Krell is a self-proclaimed tough guy who cites as one of his heroes a little-known but highly colorful "Dadaist professional boxer" called Arthur Cravan.
JAPAN
Feb 1, 2006

'Gender-free' hard to define, harder to sell

Last year's cancellation of lectures on human rights in Kokubunji, Tokyo, has pitted key feminist scholar Chizuko Ueno and free-speech advocates against conservatives in the Tokyo Metropolitan Government opposed to the use of "gender-free" -- a term whose definition varies but somehow conjures up negative...
EDITORIALS
Jan 31, 2006

The future of local post offices

Japan Post has announced a "master plan to reform postal offices" as the process of privatizing the mammoth state-run entity of 260,000 employees is set to begin in October 2007. The focus of the plan is the reform of the specially designated tokutei post offices, which account for three-fourths of the...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Jan 28, 2006

Yuko Nishimura

"I was lucky, in a way," Yuko Nishimura said. "I did most of the things I wanted. I like what I am doing now."
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 26, 2006

Why America needs the U.N.

We have to live in and manage a world in which the threat and use of force remain an ever present reality. The material capacity, economic efficiency, political organization and military skills in the use of force determine the international power hierarchy. Great powers rise and fall on the tide of...
BUSINESS / JAPANESE PERSPECTIVES
Jan 23, 2006

Regional cooperation with Japan belies focus on Yasukuni problem

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, in his first news conference of the year, argued that Yasukuni is not a diplomatic issue, rebutting claims that Japan is being isolated in Asia because of his repeated visits to the war-related Shinto shrine.
Japan Times
Features
Jan 22, 2006

Home from home

The first Doreen Wingate saw of Yokohama was the immigration and customs office next to the now famous Red Brick Warehouse on Shinko Pier. The year was 1952, and Doreen, her husband and 6-month-old son were arriving in Japan by ship, the same way as most of Yokohama's fledgling expatriate community....
COMMENTARY
Jan 10, 2006

Legions of bloggers, not so many readers

MANILA -- Hardly any other industry has developed as dynamically in recent years as the media sector. The impact of the so-called digital revolution is particularly evident in the way we communicate. Sending and receiving digitized data has become faster and faster; at the same time the costs have fallen...
COMMUNITY / How-tos / LIFELINES
Dec 27, 2005

Real estate, a good cigar and body wax

Property in Yokohama Shirley, in Monterey, Calif., found an interesting article on buying property in Japan while browsing on the Web, and had a question.
Japan Times
Features
Dec 18, 2005

New chief puts paradise on map

Many dream of traveling the world and setting themselves up in a tropical paradise, but very few people make it happen. Even fewer get themselves appointed village chief of a remote Melanesian island in the process. But that's exactly what has happened to entrepreneur and art collector Ofer Shagan.
Features
Dec 11, 2005

The 'undigested other': Koreans in Japan

Few parents would voluntarily send a son to live in North Korea; Kongsun Yang sent all three of his. In the early 1970s, Yang waved goodbye to his young Osaka-born boys, who later married and started families in Pyongyang. Poor and unhappy, the sons survive today only thanks to support from their parents...

Longform

Bear attacks have dominated Japanese news headlines in recent months, with 13 people so far having been killed by the animals.
Japan’s bears have been on their killing spree for more than 100 years