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JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Sep 21, 2000

Japan insurance market just a phone call away

For the past several years, the insurance industry has been battered on two fronts by bad publicity. On the one hand, the collapse of almost all the major life insurance companies has been blamed on poor investment choices and even poorer management, while on the other, the spate of recent murder-for-insurance...
JAPAN
Sep 20, 2000

JCP ready to revise its 1958 constitution

Marx, Lenin face ax; SDF to get nod The Japanese Communist Party on Tuesday proposed temporarily recognizing the existence of the Self-Defense Forces and revising the party's constitution to drop a preamble that upholds Marxism-Leninism.
JAPAN
Sep 20, 2000

Flood of Chinese tourists expected

Tourism promoters backing the first authorized Chinese package tour to Japan say they foresee 1 million people from Beijing, Shanghai and other parts of China visiting each year.
LIFE / Digital / SURFERSPUD
Sep 20, 2000

Harry Potter, Castles and Voodoo

www.cesnur.org/recens/potter_00.htm One of the best Harry Potter sites comes from an organization that fights censorship of modern-day culture. There's chapter-by-chapter notes for "The Goblet of Fire," the latest in the series. But most of the site is dedicated to news articles (culled from all over...
JAPAN
Sep 19, 2000

Radio stargazer's key to quakes

Astronomer Yoshio Kushida believes he will receive forewarning should a major earthquake hit.
CULTURE / Books
Sep 19, 2000

Kwangju: a turning point for South Korea

THE KWANGJU UPRISING: Eyewitness Accounts of Korea's Tiananmen, edited by Henry Scott-Stokes and Lee Jai Eui. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2000, 268 pp. $18.95 (paper). "Covering the Kwangju uprising -- and writing of it in the aftermath," a Korean observer writes, "I was stuck for words. A reporter is supposed...
ENVIRONMENT / OUR PLANET EARTH
Sep 19, 2000

Program laying groundwork to conserve rivers and trails

John Monroe jokingly refers to himself as a "conservation venture capitalist." Unlike most investment bankers, however, Monroe is investing for the long term.
JAPAN
Sep 19, 2000

Case of tanker truck blast to be handed to prosecutors

Police decided Monday to send papers to public prosecutors this week on three officials of a firm whose tanker truck exploded on a Tokyo expressway in October, injuring 25 people, investigative sources said.
COMMENTARY
Sep 18, 2000

Toward peace with Pyongyang

While North and South Korea are moving dramatically toward rapprochement as a result of the inter-Korean summit in June, Japanese and North Korean officials are set to meet again next month to discuss ways to normalize relations. Establishing diplomatic ties with Pyongyang, along with settling the territorial...
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 18, 2000

Who wants an all-white world, anyway?

LONDON -- "Whites will be a minority in Britain by the end of the century. . . . It would be the first time in history that a major indigenous population has voluntarily become a minority, rather than through war, famine and disease. Whites will be a minority in London by 2010."
CULTURE / Art
Sep 17, 2000

Sometimes a shower stall is just. . .

With his bathroom in a suitcase, MK Kahne has turned the most utilitarian dreams of wandering wayfarers into reality. Not just any old utility, this is a sexy, transportable washroom which could have been designed for Maxwell Smart, complete with dismountable plumbing that packs neatly away in the leather...
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 17, 2000

Declassify CIA files on the 'disappeared'

NEW YORK -- U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright indicated recently in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that the United States would release files with information about the Chilean and Argentine military dictatorships as a contribution to the investigations on illegal repression in both countries. Despite...
EDITORIALS
Sep 16, 2000

An equal value for every vote

In every democratic state, equality of voting rights is taken for granted, in principle, if not always in practice. There is no question that every vote should have the same value, or at least a nearly equal value, regardless of who casts it or where it is cast. In Japan's case, however, there are wide...
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 16, 2000

Shining a light on global 'Big Brother'

Perhaps more appropriately to the world of James Bond than to the European Union, Echelon -- an international spying network in which governments covertly cooperate to intercept global communications -- is causing a stir in the European Parliament.
EDITORIALS
Sep 15, 2000

The Olympic love-hate affair

The quadrennial soap opera that is the Summer Olympics gets under way again today in Sydney, inspiring the usual mixed response of blahs and hurrahs. Nobody disputes that the Summer Games have become the world's biggest recurrent spectacle, costing more than some countries' GDP and cornier than Kansas....
SPORTS / SPORTS SCOPE
Sep 14, 2000

Time to weed out Olympic imposters

So, what's in a name? A lot, apparently.
OLYMPICS
Sep 13, 2000

Dream Team coaching: perhaps the easiest job in Sydney

Want to know if the U.S. men's Olympic basketball team goes for the jugular each time out? Interested in who will give the Dream Teamers the toughest time Down Under? How do the American hoopsters handle criticism over being too good?
OLYMPICS
Sep 13, 2000

Web sites offer a different Olympic view

Want an alternative perspective of the Sydney Olympics? Look no further than the World Wide Web, where everyone from subversives to satirists are poking criticism and fun at the biggest sporting show on earth. Fired by a sense that Australia and the Games are not all sugar-coated harmony and joy -- or...
JAPAN
Sep 12, 2000

Sales of electronic dictionaries enjoy rocketing growth

OSAKA -- Portable electronic dictionaries are enjoying rocketing sales in Japan, largely among middle-aged and elderly customers attracted by the devices' easy-to-read screens and user-friendliness, industry officials say.
EDITORIALS
Sep 10, 2000

Old friends are the best

Reports from the United States tell us that some Americans are having their faith restored in a popular postwar Japanese export. The subject of their revived affection is not a car or a motorcycle, not a camera or an audiovisual device, not a laptop personal computer or other advanced information-technology...
CULTURE / Art
Sep 10, 2000

Cambodian art regains its youth

"It's my everyday passion," says Phloeun Prim, the 24-year-old commercial manager of Les Artisans d'Angkor, a Siem Reap-based school which is training young people in skills such as silk weaving and stone carving.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 10, 2000

Multiculturalism and meritocracy are key

We live in a world of at least 2,000 nationalities, 200 states and 20 nation-states (where the populations are more or less homogeneous). The doctrine of self-determination was one of the most powerful ideologies of the 20th century. The drive to self-determination by disaffected communities created...
JAPAN
Sep 9, 2000

NPA orders streamlining of forces, operations

The National Police Agency ordered prefectural police forces throughout the country Friday to drastically streamline operations by cutting management personnel and outsourcing work, NPA officials said.
JAPAN
Sep 9, 2000

MSDF officer arrested, admits spying for Russia

The Metropolitan Police Department and Kanagawa Prefectural Police arrested Lt. Cmdr. Shigehiro Hagisaki, a researcher at the Defense Agency's National Institute for Defense Studies, on suspicion of violating the Self-Defense Forces Law, which prohibits SDF members from divulging classified security...
CULTURE / Art / CERAMIC SCENE
Sep 9, 2000

Putting no price on the beautiful

If all the pottery that I live with and use suddenly disappeared from my home, I would find myself quite blue. Those pieces, in their silent voices, spark my imagination and encourage me to live each day with grace and style; they are good friends. Someday I know I will have to part with them; that is...
JAPAN
Sep 7, 2000

Miyake gets power back after 21 hours

Power was restored to most areas of Miyake Island on Wednesday after the essential personnel who remain on the volcanic island went 21 hours without electricity, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government said.

Longform

A mushroom cloud from the atomic bombing on Hiroshima taken from a U.S. military aircraft on Aug. 6, 1945. Copying the photo without permission is prohibited.
80 years on, a Japanese American hibakusha recalls the day the bomb dropped