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WORLD
Jul 24, 2014

Dogs are capable of feeling jealousy, U.S. study says

Dogs are a man's best friend, and research released on Wednesday says canines want to keep it that way.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 23, 2014

Airline deaths won't end conflict in Ukraine

Thanks to a perverse kind of geographical bias, the downing of MH17 won't put an end to the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 22, 2014

Success of Chinese reform is key to BRICS' rise

Last week, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) took a decisive step toward building institutions that could plausibly challenge the long geopolitical and economic ascendancy of the West. But Vladimir Putin's posturing at the meeting just hours before a Malaysia Airlines jetliner was shot down in Ukraine was one indication of the group's inability to offer an acceptable moral and political alternative to Western hegemony.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / VIEWS FROM THE STREET
Jul 21, 2014

Atami: What do you make of this statue of a jilted gent kicking a girl while she's down?

Gracing the shoreline in Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture, is a statue unique among the many in Japan that celebrate local legends or famous historical figures: A work depicting a man kicking a woman.
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Jul 21, 2014

Stuck in the middle with chū — one kanji's central role

In the 1981 novel "Red Dragon" — the first Thomas Harris thriller featuring archvillain Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter — the Sino-Japanese ideograph 中 (read naka or chū, and meaning center or middle) makes an appearance. It is composed of a rectangle with a line going through its center. Graphically...
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Jul 19, 2014

Lost Tokyo ... rediscovered

People who have lived in the capital for more than a few years generally claim to know Tokyo pretty well. We discover a forgotten side to the city that suggests they may not know it quite as well as they think.
CULTURE / Books
Jul 19, 2014

Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential

"Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential" was first published in 2010, offering readers a rare insight into a growing global fascination with the image of the Japanese schoolgirl. This revised edition features eight new sections that focus on developments on the subject, including an analysis of the fall and...
WORLD / Science & Health
Jul 17, 2014

Mutant worms may hold key to drugs blocking the effects of alcohol

Mutant worms may show a way to prevent people from becoming intoxicated from alcohol, a study released on Wednesday said.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / BLACK EYE
Jul 16, 2014

Unpacking koto: retain, discard and repeat as necessary

Unpacking koto — the intangible baggage — in Japan has proven to be the challenge of a lifetime, replete with enough drama and trauma to keep me knee deep in 'think pieces' till I keel over.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / JAPANESE KITCHEN
Jul 15, 2014

Japanese summer garnishes invigorate the taste buds

In Japanese cooking, garnish is not just added to a dish to make it look pretty. The word to describe the herbs and vegetables that accompany a dish is yakumi, which means "medicinal flavor," and originally referred to the concoctions that practitioners of Chinese medicine made using various ingredients...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 15, 2014

Can't win by ravaging Gaza

Israel's targeting of Hamas is an attempt to distract from the slowly building collective sentiment among Palestinians throughout Palestine and among Palestinian citizens in Israel.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 15, 2014

U.S. policy triggered latest border crisis

The U.S. does everything it can to screw up the Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, then acts surprised when desperate people from there, including thousands of children, show up at the U.S. border, trying to escape the carnage.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 15, 2014

Kremlin's expensive trip down memory lane

Moscow is preparing to spend billions of dollars to restart construction on the storied and ill-starred Baikal-Amur Mainline railroad. Sadly Vladimir Putin's nostalgia will come at great cost to the country's pension system.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 11, 2014

If only the U.S. had stayed out of WWI

Did U.S. intervention in the latter stage of World War I end up in just prolonging the European slaughter? David A. Stockman, first-term budget director for President Ronald Reagan, says it did as well as trigger a cascade of offenses later on in the 20th century.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 11, 2014

The silver fox of dictatorship and democracy

The reality of the times was that Eduard Shevardnadze was both a democrat and a despot. His death brings closer to the end the Gorbachev generation of reform communists who presented a stark contrast to the dour Brezhnev-era hard-liners, spurring (mostly inadvertently) the collapse of the Soviet empire and the long transition to democracy.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 11, 2014

Germany's triumph in Brazil was no surprise

Everything about the 7-1 German victory over Brazil in a World Cup semifinal was logical and even overdue. The entire German soccer system has been working toward this moment since 2001.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 11, 2014

Is there a right to secede?

If a majority of the voters in a distinct region of a country favor independence, does that mean that they have a right to secede? Paradoxically the EU has made it more feasible for states like Scotland and Catalonia to consider independence.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 11, 2014

Megacities offer toxic mix of modern apocalypse

Exhibits at the 14th Venice Biennale of Architecture demonstrate that the urgent challenge for many societies is to prevent the megacity from becoming a byword for multifaceted apoclypse, mashinging together poverty, corruption, violence and fundamentalism.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Jul 10, 2014

Cost of passive power struggles

The chairman of the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation recalls how the failure of the navy minister to express a truthful personal opinion within a group closed the window on Japanese doves' hopes of averting war months before the Pearl Harbor attack.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jul 10, 2014

'George Nelson: Architect, Writer, Designer, Teacher'

Best known for being the design director of the Herman Miller furniture company, George Nelson (1908-1986) was one of the most influential figures in modern American design, whose collaborations with Isamu Noguchi, Alexander Girard and Charles and Ray Eames, to name a few, resulted in some of the most...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jul 10, 2014

'Takehiko Inoue interprets Gaudi's Universe'

Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) left behind an unrivaled legacy of Modernist architecture — Casa Vicens, Casa Mila, the famous unfinished basilica Sagrada Familia and many more unusual structures. His imaginative, often colorful works inspired other architects and artists, and continues to do so today.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 9, 2014

'Omoide no Marnie (When Marnie Was There)'

Since its start nearly three decades ago, Studio Ghibli has been dominated by the creativity of co-founders Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. But since the turn of the millennium, five of its 10 feature films have been made by other, younger directors.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 8, 2014

Whitewashing the Iraq war

As Iraq stands on the verge of a complete breakdown into sectarian states, a former leading Iraq war advocate is popping up in the U.S. media, and he's in no mood to accept any responsibility for the protracted tragedy.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 8, 2014

Shevardnadze's lessons for the West

Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister and Georgian president who died Monday at 86, was not an effective leader, but if Western leaders had paid closer attention to what he said when he was alive, they would have been better prepared for today's crisis in Ukraine.
ENVIRONMENT
Jul 8, 2014

Amazon rain forest grew after climate change 2,000 years ago

Swaths of the Amazon may have been grassland until a natural shift to a wetter climate about 2,000 years ago let the rain forests form, according to a study that challenges common belief that the world's biggest tropical forest is far older.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jul 5, 2014

Ongoing Obokata story seeks out scandal

The paper, titled "Stimulus-triggered fate conversion of somatic cells into pluripotency," was accepted by the British science journal Nature on Dec. 20, 2013, and published online on Jan. 29, 2014. The authors were listed as Haruko Obokata, Teruhiko Wakayama, Yoshiki Sasai, Koji Kojima, Martin P. Vacanti,...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 4, 2014

NSA surveillance needs more alert watchdog

A U.S. senator now worries that there isn't the judicial oversight to prevent the National Security Agency from using its access to the giant pile of foreign-intelligence information it has collected over many years to conduct warrantless searches for communications from Americans.
JAPAN / Science & Health
Jul 3, 2014

Nature journal retracts STAP papers, citing 'critical errors'

Science journal Nature officially retracts two stem cell papers published by a team of Japanese and U.S. scientists whose “ground-breaking” work was undermined by errors.

Longform

A small shrine perched atop rocks braves the waves hitting the shoreline during a storm in Shimoda, Shizuoka Prefecture. The area is under threat of a possible 31-meter-high tsunami if an earthquake strikes the nearby Nankai Trough.
If the 'Big One' hits, this city could face a 31-meter-high tsunami