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Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Oct 31, 2006

Slow food, an attitude as much as a meal

In the 1960s, Japan's first instant ramen changed people's eating habits significantly by making it possible to get dinner in as little as three minutes. Even putting fast food and microwave dinners aside, eating has become easier and more functional since those days, due either to higher living standards...
EDITORIALS
Oct 18, 2006

A more user-friendly legal system

A nationwide system now offers people easy access to legal advice and services. On Oct. 2, the services of Nihon Shiho Shien Senta (Japan Legal Support Center) or Ho Terasu (Law Terrace) became available to anyone, including those involved in civil cases or those who have been arrested on suspicion of...
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 12, 2006

Restoring our connections with the world

"The cloud-seas of the heavens are riled by waves.
EDITORIALS
Oct 3, 2006

Minamata's latest chapter

This year marked the 50th anniversary of the official recognition of Minamata disease, a symbol of postwar industrial pollution in Japan. But the episode of massive organic mercury poisoning is not a thing of the past. On Aug. 11, a group of 100 people who have not been officially recognized as sufferers...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 28, 2006

Celebrating civilizations

The Islamic world is home to one of the richest and most important musical traditions on Earth. It doesn't hurt that it also spans an incredibly vast area, stretching west to Morocco and east as far as Indonesia, and that it contains an intricate tapestry of races, languages and cultures, or that it...
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / OUR PLANET EARTH
Sep 27, 2006

Welcome to the new world of cities

Flying into Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, just after sunset last month, I could have sworn we'd overshot the airport and were heading for the distant, frigid waters of the South Atlantic.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 22, 2006

Following the father

You've probably heard of the father of Afrobeat bandmaster and award-winning musician Femi Kuti. And if by chance you haven't, you're missing out on one of Africa's greatest musical legends.
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Sep 19, 2006

End of the Lion

The mythmaker Jim Frederick TIME Magazine The most difficult aspect of reporting on Koizumi was confronting the fixed, immutable and monolithic "Koizumi Myth." What started as a campaign plank -- "Koizumi is a reformer and a rebel who is destroying the LDP and reinvigorating Japan" -- somehow became...
JAPAN / LASTING IMPACT
Sep 18, 2006

Aum's crimes marked start of growing public safety fear

Last in a series
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 14, 2006

TB and HIV: a combination made in hell

PRAGUE -- Fatima, who lives in western Tanzania near Lake Tanganyika, has been suffering for more than a month from a dry, hacking cough. She trembles to think that it might mean she has tuberculosis. Fatima knows that she can find out and, if necessary, receive treatment at the nearest health clinic,...
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 14, 2006

Emerging from the nuclear shadow

"At any given moment in history, precious few voices are heard crying out for justice. But, now more than ever, those voices must rise above the din of violence and hatred."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 14, 2006

The last weekend of summer to rave about

For Japan's trance music fans, this weekend is the last big outdoor romp of summer.
EDITORIALS
Sep 10, 2006

Tears for the Crocodile Hunter

The curious phrase "crocodile tears" might need redefining in the wake of the death of Australia's famed "Crocodile Hunter," Steve Irwin. Shakespeare coined the term, an allusion to the Romans' belief that crocodiles weep as they eat their prey, to describe an insincere display of grief, false tears....
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 28, 2006

It pays to join China's CCP

LONDON -- The Chinese government recently announced that membership in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has grown to a record 71 million; apparently there are also 17 million applicants waiting to join. Last year 2,540,000 people were admitted. Since 1990 party membership has grown by almost one-fifth....
Japan Times
LIFE / DISABILITY IN JAPAN
Aug 27, 2006

Teamwork trounces deafness

This story is part of a package on "Disability in Japan". The introduction is here.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Aug 24, 2006

The 'fools' dance'

'O doru aho ni miru aho, onaji ahonara odorana son son (Dancing fool and watching fool. If both are fools, then dance, or you'll lose big)."
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Aug 20, 2006

A nation of animal lovers -- as pets or when they're on a plate

The Japanese consider themselves a compassionate people when it comes to an animal's fate. Memorial stones have been erected in whaling villages since the early Edo Period (1603-1867), as they are today at slaughterhouses. Buddhist priests are hired to read the sutras before altars set with incense and...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music / THE SECOND ROOM
Aug 11, 2006

Psychedelic radar 08.11

Mother: Aug. 13-15
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 10, 2006

Facing the past, embracing the future

To communicate the truths of history is an act of hope for the future. We thus owe it to the youthful generations of the 21st century to communicate the hatred of war, the commitment to peace, that was engraved in so many lives on Aug. 15, 1945.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 10, 2006

There's an art to saving country life

Just a few hours north of Tokyo's seemingly endless sprawl is the mountainous region of Echigo-Tsumari in Niigata Prefecture. Like so many other rural parts of northern Japan, it is a rugged, isolated, aging and economically stagnant place where elderly men and women can be found doubled over in terraced...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Aug 8, 2006

Japan media focus blurred on big issues

All the pain of the tragedy that has befallen their family is etched in the crumpled faces of Shigeru and Sakie Yokota.
LIFE
Jul 30, 2006

What's Japan's secret of 'many happy returns'?

Japan may never have become the world's No. 1 economy, and, faced with other rising Asian powers, it probably never will be. Nonetheless, there is one thing at which Japan proudly excels above all nations: its people's longevity.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 27, 2006

The revenge of the Red Demon

Playwright, actor and director Hideki Noda has been the undisputed leader of the Japanese contemporary theater world for 30 years. In that time he has written, directed and often acted in more than 60 plays in Japan -- all of them hits or superhits among his mushrooming fanbase. In fact, Noda has been...
JAPAN / Politics
Jul 23, 2006

Retired Yasukuni official recounts turmoil over war criminal question

in Kashihara, Nara Prefecture, in May 1981. KYODO FILE PHOTO
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 20, 2006

Happiness, money and giving it away

PRINCETON, New Jersey -- Would you be happier if you were richer? Many people believe that they would be. But research conducted over many years suggests that greater wealth implies greater happiness only at quite low levels of income. People in the United States, for example, are, on average, richer...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 19, 2006

Bombings demonstrate what Bombay is made of

MADRAS, India -- A day after maximum terror struck India's financial capital, Bombay, the city of 17 million people was back on its feet. Even London took four days after last July's explosions to get over the shock and trauma.
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jul 16, 2006

Fractured families bode ill for Japan's gray army

The late actor Kiyoshi Atsumi, who played Tora-san in all of the movies with that title, was a compassionate man of the old Japanese school.

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