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Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jul 26, 2007

And the beat goes on

Weatherbeaten and remote, the fishing port of Ogi hardly seems like a cultural magnet. Yet the unassuming little community on the southern peninsula of Niigata Prefecture's Sado Island has achieved worldwide renown as the site of Earth Celebration, a music festival with a twist.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 26, 2007

The village of the dammed

Shortly after being relocated to other towns in the late 1980s to make way for Japan's largest dam, about 10 aging former residents defiantly returned to the abandoned village of Tokuyama, in western Gifu Prefecture, determined to live there as long as possible. They sheltered in their old homes or makeshift...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 22, 2007

Video crime peril vs. virtual pedophilia

PRINCETON, New Jersey — In a popular Internet role-playing game called Second Life, people can create a virtual identity for themselves, choosing such things as their age, sex and appearance. These virtual characters then do things that people in the real world do, such as having sex.
ENVIRONMENT
Jul 22, 2007

TETRAPODS

Ah, tetrapods!
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jul 22, 2007

Outsiders, or not; that is the question

I wish I had a yen or two for every time I've been told: "You will never be accepted in Japan."
Japan Times
CULTURE / OTAKOOL
Jul 19, 2007

'Heavy-metal suicide'

Marty Friedman looks very metal.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Jul 17, 2007

How to survive summer fatigue

Imagine being in a sauna for a few hours. Then imagine getting out of it and walking straight into a giant freezer for another few hours. Do this several times a day and continue the routine for a couple of months. Some people say that's what spending summer in Japan is like.
Japan Times
JAPAN / UPPER HOUSE SHOWDOWN
Jul 13, 2007

Novice candidates have issues

Political newcomers, including wartime Prime Minister Gen. Hideki Tojo's granddaughter, a former TV Asahi newscaster and a hemophiliac with HIV, hit the Tokyo campaign trail Thursday, vying to represent voters in the House of Councilors.
Japan Times
LIFE / REFUGEES AND JAPAN
Jul 8, 2007

Diplomat rues Tokyo's 'lack of humanity' to asylum-seekers

Sadako Ogata was the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees from 1991-2001, and has been President of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) since 2003. Here, she talks frankly to The Japan Times about Japan's attitudes to those who flee their homelands and seek sanctuary on these shores.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 5, 2007

Drama and deconstruction

What goes around comes around, they say, and in the early 1980s, Japan's contemporary drama scene was transformed by a slew of small companies that were the artistic heirs of the previous generation's radical student politics. That brave new world of the so-called shogekijo (small-scale theater movement)...
CULTURE / Film
Jun 29, 2007

Steel sells hard story

Eric Steel is a Yale graduate who's been active in publishing and producing for some 20 years now, but has only just made his own feature debut as director with "The Bridge." Inspired by an article in The New Yorker ("Jumpers," by Tad Friend), Steel set out to record the phenomenon of suicide at the...
EDITORIALS
Jun 26, 2007

Low number of organ transplants

Ten years have passed since the Organ Transplantation Law was enacted, allowing organ transplants from brain-dead people. So far there have been only 56 of these organ transplants. The latest was carried out on June 14 and 15, using the heart, pancreas and kidneys from a woman in her 50s. The small number...
Japan Times
LIFE
Jun 24, 2007

PARKLIFE: You'd be amazed

Pick a park. Get up early. Stay till late. In between you'll be amazed what goes on.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jun 23, 2007

Feet, feet . . . where would we be without them?

As the weather warms up, off come the tights and socks and it's time for sandals. But what are these? Yes, the two possibly pale, calloused, misshapen — for which read "mistreated" — things upon which you are now standing, called feet.
Japan Times
LIFE
Jun 10, 2007

Here comes the sun . . .

Some may shudder at the very thought of it, but more and more people are flinging off their duvets with glee and bounding into action-packed days that start when even larks are still lounging in their nests
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jun 3, 2007

Class rifts widen as Japan's flag-wavers wax patriotic

Why can't Japan cope with poverty?
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Jun 3, 2007

Another countryside 'renaissance' mired in foggy politics

A few weeks ago I traveled around the Noto Peninsula to see how the area was recovering from the 7.1-magnitude earthquake that struck March 25. Some buildings had already been razed in the small, picturesque town of Monzen, though the coastal city of Wajima, which on the day I arrived was receiving a...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 31, 2007

'Mourning' turns into celebration

"Mogari No Mori (The Mourning Forest)," the Japanese film that crept up from behind bigger-name productions to win the Grand Prix at this year's Cannes Film Festival, revolves around an old man's unswerving desire to find his wife's grave.
LIFE / QUEUING
May 27, 2007

All together now: Let's form a line

It is 11:15 on a sunny Sunday morning across the road from Shinjuku Station in central Tokyo. The Southern Terrace there is already thronged with shoppers like all the city's other retail districts. And then, as you walk past fashion stores and coffee shops, a long line of men and women of all ages materializes...
EDITORIALS
May 24, 2007

Living without diapers

As Japan's population becomes grayer, one issue society must address is how to decrease the reliance on the use of diapers. It is an issue that concerns people's quality of life as well as nursing care costs. Many elderly people may not have been given proper care and treatment, resulting in unnecessary...
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
May 24, 2007

Wildlife corridors, the key to conservation

HAZARIBAGH, Jharkhand, India — As a new environmental consciousness becomes more entrenched, the focus for conserving the so-called "flagship species" such as the great predator tigers and bears, and also elephants, has shifted. When India's Project Tiger was started in the 1970s with the purpose of...
COMMENTARY / World
May 23, 2007

Leave 'patriotism' out of Constitution

In October 2005, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) approved draft proposals whose main thrust is to revise the Preamble and Article 9 of Japan's Constitution. The new preamble includes "the obligation to support ourselves . . . with love for the country and society to which we belong," a veiled...
CULTURE / Books
May 20, 2007

Listening to history's creaking bones

ORACLE BONES: A Journey Between China's Past and Present, by Peter Hessler. HarperCollins, 2006, 491 pp., $26.95 (cloth) Beside their obvious antiquity, why should heaps of cattle shoulder-blades and turtle shells dating from the 13th and 14th centuries B.C. be of such immense importance to today's...
COMMENTARY
May 14, 2007

Cherry-picking an identity

LONDON — Political leaders nowadays are fond of talking about national identity and culture, but do we know what they mean by either identity or culture, and do they know themselves what they mean?
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
May 9, 2007

OK computer, is that person's face happy or sad?

Afriend of mine told me the other day about the time she was teaching special needs children in Miyazaki Prefecture. One boy had autism, and threw terrible tantrums the first few times my friend came to teach.
EDITORIALS
Apr 28, 2007

Quake victims still need support

Many people are still living under inconvenient conditions more than a month after a major earthquake hit Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture on March 25, killing one person and injuring more than 300. In the city of Wajima, the hardest-hit municipality, more than 1,000 houses were either destroyed...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Apr 26, 2007

Japanese/Chinese production tackles history

In 2002, the FIFA World Cup of soccer hosted by Japan and South Korea boosted already flourishing cultural exchanges between the two countries in areas such as pop music, shopping and television dramas. The same year, the scriptwriter and director Oriza Hirata, who founded the Tokyo-based Seinendan Theater...
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 24, 2007

No smile limit in this Australian town

PRINCETON, New Jersey -- If you were to walk along the streets of your neighborhood with your face up and an open expression, how many of those who passed you would smile, or greet you in some way?

Longform

Figure skater Akiko Suzuki was once told her ideal weight should be 47 kilograms, a number she now admits she “naively believed.” This led to her have a relationship with food that resulted in her suffering from anorexia.
The silent battle Japanese athletes fight with weight