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EDITORIALS
Dec 9, 2007

Good news about Iran

In a sharp and striking reversal, the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Iran has stopped work on its suspected nuclear weapons program. This revelation contrasts with the Bush administration's recent rhetoric warning that Iran's determination to develop a nuclear weapon could spark a war,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 7, 2007

'Angel'

Had filmmaker Francois Ozon ("Under the Sand," "The Swimming Pool") been around in Vienna at the same time as Freud, he would have put the good doctor out of business in a week; this is one man who really, truly understands women and what they want, seemingly without the mighty and constricted efforts...
CULTURE / Film
Nov 30, 2007

'The Nativity Story'

Motherhood is a rum thing to begin with but motherhood in the mid-teens, in superconservative ancient Nazareth, engaged to a man you've never met and who is definitely not the father of the baby — well, then it would be time to hit the panic button, if only such a thing had existed.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Nov 15, 2007

A big noise about what?

'I think the best pop is always subversive in its nature," says James Righton over the phone from London a few days after his band Klaxons beat the bookies' odds to win the Mercury Music Prize, a major award that gives $40,000 to the "best" British or Irish album of the year. "Even things like Abba —...
COMMENTARY
Nov 14, 2007

Telling the truth about the limits of oil

LONDON — If a diplomat is "an honest man sent abroad to lie for the good of his country" (Sir Henry Wotton, 1612), then oil industry executives used to be the business world's equivalent of diplomats.
COMMENTARY
Nov 4, 2007

Something about a one-party approach

LOS ANGELES — Under the communist system — as history has taught — you get to persecute potential opposition parties, warehouse political prisoners and pervert the country's patriotism with a noxious Orwellian poison of prickly but pervasive paranoia.
TENNIS
Oct 4, 2007

Venus shrugs off questions about health after beating King in straight sets

Maybe Venus Williams needs that vacation after all.
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Sep 30, 2007

Bilingual blanks are nothing to kobosu your guchi about

Last week in this column, I addressed the trials and tribulations of bringing up a child to be bilingual — both for parents and children. As anyone who has been down that road knows, it's what Japanese people would call shinan no waza (an arduous task).
COMMENTARY
Sep 22, 2007

Thought Iraq was about oil? Guess again

LONDON — Australia's defense minister, Brendan Nelson, is not the sharpest tool in the box, so people were not really surprised in July when he blurted out that the real motive for invading Iraq was oil:
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 14, 2007

The guitar skeptic

For a guy who's routinely credited with revolutionizing the sound of jazz, Pat Metheny sounds surprisingly detached from his mode of musical expression.
COMMENTARY
Sep 11, 2007

Scaremongering about China, as usual

LOS ANGELES — It might almost seem like a game of geopolitical chicken: How far can we go in creating monstrous new fears about China?
EDITORIALS
Sep 3, 2007

The truth about Myanmar

Myanmar's democrats continue to struggle to be heard. After a series of protests around the country, the military junta has deployed street toughs to rough up anyone who dares take to the streets to demonstrate. The military's over-reaction indicates how brittle its rule is, how fearful it is of any...
BUSINESS / THE VIEW FROM EUROPE
Sep 3, 2007

Merkel to Japan: Leading G8 not only about environment

Last week's visit to Japan by German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave Prime Minister Shinzo Abe a sobering lesson in G8 politics. Germany currently holds the G8 presidency but will pass the baton to Japan in January.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Aug 29, 2007

Let's (try to) get serious about silliness

August is known as the "silly season" in the media in the United States and the United Kingdom, as newspaper editors faced with legislators all gone on holiday struggle in vain to fill their pages and resort to, well, silly stories.
Reader Mail
Aug 26, 2007

What about shootings in Japan?

The timing of Hiroaki Sato's article leaves something to be desired. Sato asks why Americans can't give up their guns, yet a Japan Times front-page article on the same day ("Gang boss shot hours after rival gunned down," Aug. 20) is about two yakuza shootings. Why can't the Japanese give up their...
Reader Mail
Aug 15, 2007

Wrong idea about kinesiology

John Wocher's Aug. 8 letter, "Another quack therapy let loose," demonstrates Wocher's ignorance. (Wocher includes "kinesiology" in a list of alternative-medicine therapies that he suggests lack a scientific foundation.)
JAPAN
Jul 14, 2007

U.S. sex slave resolution about human rights, not Japan-bashing: Honda

and Rep. Jim Costa talk as they wait for a markup session on the sex slave resolution to start in the House Foreign Affairs Committee on June 26 on Capitol Hill. AP PHOTO
JAPAN
Jul 11, 2007

Japan upset by U.S. Navy disclosure about joint drill

The Defense Ministry was in a stir Tuesday over the U.S. Navy's public release of specific details on a joint missile defense exercise last week that the ministry didn't know or that it wanted to be kept secret, including the amount of time it took to inform the prime minister that an enemy state had...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 9, 2007

Act of missionary hypocrisy

The ordeal of the women who were coerced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Armed Forces during the 1930s and 1940s is beyond dispute, as is the responsibility of the Japanese state for these deeds.
JAPAN / Q&A
Jun 30, 2007

Why the big fuss about SIA? Some answers

Two bills to replace the Social Insurance Agency with a government corporation were set to be enacted in the early hours of Saturday morning, despite the opposition camp's last-ditch attempts to stop the vote in the House of Councilors.
BUSINESS
Jun 27, 2007

Nippon Steel unsure about expanding ties with Arcelor Mittal

Nippon Steel Corp., the world's second-largest steelmaker, said Tuesday no "concrete" decision had been made about expanding cooperation with bigger rival Arcelor Mittal.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jun 24, 2007

Somewhere between history and the imagination

David Mitchell is one of Britain's most influential novelists. "Ghostwritten" (1999), his first novel, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Shortlisted for the 2002 Man Booker Prize for fiction, his second novel, "number9dream" (2001),...
JAPAN
Jun 22, 2007

Chongryun's No. 2 man quizzed about HQ deal

, was questioned about the property deal the group made with Shigetake Ogata, 73, who formerly headed the Public Security Intelligence Agency, the sources said. The agency's mission is to surveil groups engaged in subversive activities. Monitoring Chongryun is one of its priorities.
Reader Mail
Jun 13, 2007

What about cigarette smoke?

Regarding the May 31 article "Government proposes programs for asthma prevention in Tokyo wards": It is interesting that Japan's government is focused on automobile pollution in its asthma prevention programs while apparently ignoring cigarette smoking as a major known cause of breathing problems, including...

Longform

Once smoky, male-dominated spaces, today's net cafes, like Kaikatsu Club, are working to make their operations more attractive to women customers.
The second life of Japan's net cafes