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CULTURE / Books
Feb 16, 2000

Don't give up hope for China's democrats

CHINA'S TRANSITION, by Andrew Nathan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, 313 pp., $19.50, 13.50 British pounds (paper). China is like Chernobyl, Andrew Nathan writes. The more you learn about it, the worse it gets.
CULTURE / Art
Feb 12, 2000

Simple beauty from unknown craftsmen

Dotted throughout Japan are the potting centers of the common people, makers of wholesome, durable and utilitarian pots. In contrast with tea ceremony utensils and porcelain which were reserved for nobility, the wealthy or export, these folk kilns made zakki or ordinary crockery that met the needs of...
CULTURE / Books
Feb 8, 2000

The cat in the hat goes to war like that

DR. SEUSS GOES TO WAR: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel, by Richard Minear, introduction by Art Spiegelman. The New Press, 1999, 272 pp. To most Americans who grew up with Dr. Seuss' oddly, endearingly drawn critters and facile rhymes ("And then he ran out. / And, then, fast...
CULTURE / Music
Feb 5, 2000

At last, a live house for hogaku

Tokyo, being a vibrant, world-class metropolis, is home to hundreds of small musical venues ("live houses") which offer everything: the top names in the jazz world, rock and punk, piano parlor music, ethnic music from Asia, China, Korea, Africa, India, among others, as well as American and European folk...
CULTURE / Art
Feb 5, 2000

It's not hard to get hooked on fly-fishing

Fly-fishing has a certain mystique. It's not uncommon for an angler equipped with a deep knowledge of aquatic insects and a perfect midair loop to stand in the cold for hours without netting a single trout.
CULTURE / Stage
Feb 4, 2000

Dance fests spotlight solo performances

Tokyo is awash with festivals of dance this month, mostly by solo dancers, which is not surprising since the majority of performers here prefer the controlled environment of one-man shows. But what is surprising is that even with all the organization involved in planning these events, the sudden accumulation...
ENVIRONMENT
Feb 2, 2000

Look out for masked bandits at roadside

It is amazing what one can see out of the corner of an eye.
MORE SPORTS
Jan 28, 2000

Rams' version of 'Warner Bros.' aim to tame Titans

ATLANTA -- People call them the Warner Bros. But there won't be any Tweety or Sylvester at the Georgia Dome when the Tennessee Titans face the St. Louis Rams on Sunday in the Super Bowl XXXIV.
COMMUNITY
Jan 28, 2000

Printed Matter turns 20 with multi-genre event

Printed Matter, "Tokyo's International Literary Review," which boasts of being Japan's oldest English literary journal, can now claim to be Japan's largest.
CULTURE / Stage
Jan 23, 2000

Process of progress; idea to performance

There's a new wind blowing through the performing arts this month, with two companies showing the fruits of "works in progress" instead of finished productions, although any difference in quality seems to be marginal.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Jan 23, 2000

Mary Cogan

Amongst many distinctions of different kinds, Tokyo has one that merits affectionate attention. Tokyo hosts the only Saint Patrick's Day Parade in Asia.
COMMUNITY
Jan 23, 2000

U.S. lawyer set to solve your immigration woes

Being a quietly spoken, modest-sounding soul, immigration lawyer Mark Ivener, of the California-based law practice Ivener & Holt, may not like the following revelation. But the fact is he gives a good part of his professional time for free by giving immigration lectures and seminars.
COMMUNITY / How-tos
Jan 23, 2000

Buried in time

A woman writes of her problem. It is likely to remain one. She has a collection of what she calls bark pictures, produced in Japan after World War II. She describes them as landscapes composed of mountains made of tree bark, trees made of moss, and painted water and skies. She doubts if they were considered...
LIFE
Jan 20, 2000

Living within the abundance of less

When Osamu Nakamura is not in the mountains of Nepal studying woodblock print making, he's almost always in the small farmhouse among the terraced rice fields in the interior of Shikoku that he calls home. He has no telephone, so if you want to visit, you have to stop by to see if he is in.
LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA
Jan 19, 2000

Space on the range

When the deliciously innovative iMacs were unveiled last year there was a collective gasp: What?! No floppy drive? How do I transfer files?
LIFE / Travel
Jan 19, 2000

Nagano's 'time-slip' onsen

Many hot spring resorts these days look so similar that it's sometimes hard to remember where you are. Not Bessho Onsen.
COMMUNITY / How-tos
Jan 19, 2000

New opportunities

I have a letter from a 15-year-old girl in Germany. She has blue-gray eyes and dark blond hair. She speaks English, French and German. She tells me of her school and her hobbies. She has a cat called Blacky. She is looking for pen-friends in Japan.
CULTURE / Books
Jan 18, 2000

Southeast Asia: creature of Japan?

THE SPECTRE OF COMPARISONS: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World, by Benedict Anderson. London: Verso, 1999, 374 pp., 13.00 British pounds (paper). The Japanese invented Southeast Asia. This is just one of the pieces of intellectual dynamite that Benedict Anderson tosses into the reader's lap...
CULTURE / Art
Jan 16, 2000

Stitched with love by mothers' hands

Teenagers rarely go to museums by choice, but Bunka Gakuen Costume Museum in Shinjuku is a special case. On a recent lunchtime visit groups of lively students came into the galleries and fell into quiet, appreciative murmurs over the needlework of Indian villagers and Japanese grandmothers.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Jan 16, 2000

Masayuki Kurokawa

At the recent Art of Dining Exhibition sponsored by Refugees International-Japan, Masayuki Kurokawa and his wife, Taki Katoh, cooperated in presenting a table setting profoundly and strikingly simple. It symbolized, they said, "the harmonization of natural and man-made phenomena."
COMMUNITY / How-tos / GETTING THINGS DONE
Jan 12, 2000

Win some, lose some

Like many of our readers, I continue to miss Gary Larson's The Far Side cartoons. Now I have 366 of them in a millennium collection brought up to date with color and appropriate historic dates which the publisher, Andrews McMeel of Kansas City, calls "a refreshingly irreverent retrospective of the last...
JAPAN
Jan 11, 2000

Yachiyo Bank to take over failed Kokumin

Yachiyo Bank and state-appointed administrators of Kokumin Bank announced Tuesday that the two parties have reached a basic agreement to have Yachiyo take over the failed second-tier regional bank. Of the five second-tier regional banks that went under after the financial reconstruction law took effect...
JAPAN
Jan 10, 2000

Make 'Rebuilding Confidence' the government slogan for 2000

Last year a series of mishaps shook our faith in various things we have grown to trust over the years, from the H-II rocket failure and the crumbling tunnels of our shinkansen lines to the nuclearcriticality accident in Tokai, Ibaraki Prefecture.
COMMUNITY
Jan 3, 2000

Picture-book village looks to the children

Once upon a time, sometime in 1992, there were two communities, Kijo-cho and Ishikawauchi, nestled high in the mountains of Miyazaki Prefecture. As in many such rural communities, the sound of children's voices was becoming a rarity as young families left to find their fortune in the city of Miyazaki,...
CULTURE / Books
Dec 30, 1999

Explore high-tech versions of Japanese classics

GENJI MONOGATARI (THE TALE OF GENJI). Nihon Koten Bungaku Series 1. Released by Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory Ltd. Windows/Macintosh Hybrid CD-ROMs. Kawasaki, Japan and San Jose, CA: Fujitsu Software Corp., 1996. Bilingual Japanese-English. Two disks boxed separately. 6,000 yen or $68 each. HEIKE...
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 30, 1999

Russia's Jewish homeland: a Stalinist experiment in social engineering lingers on

BIROBIDZHAN, RUSSIA -- Mikhail Kul was a soldier in the Soviet Army that helped defeat Germany in 1945, but he returned home to find that the Holocaust had emptied his Ukrainian village of most of its inhabitants.
JAPAN
Dec 29, 1999

Writer, artist unite to portray Okinawa's problems

Staff writer OSAKA -- When artist Seitaro Kuroda was videotaping a series of war stories for children written by prize-winning author Akiyuki Nosaka, he noticed something was missing. The stories, which first appeared in a magazine in 1971, described the hardship brought upon children and animals by...
JAPAN
Dec 29, 1999

Rengo Osaka backs bureaucrat for poll

OSAKA -- Rengo Osaka, the local political arm of the Japanese Trade Union Confederation (Rengo), plans to back Fusae Ota, councilor of the minister's secretariat at the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, in the upcoming gubernatorial election, it was learned Wednesday. The governorship of...
COMMUNITY / How-tos / GETTING THINGS DONE
Dec 23, 1999

Yearend nostalgia

There is something about the holiday season that brings out nostalgia. Old times are recalled. We reach out with Christmas and New Year's cards to friends we haven't seen for years. A lot of conversations begin with, Do you remember . . . It seems that although most people anticipate the opportunities...
LIFE / Travel
Dec 22, 1999

Sun shines again for the city on the Neva

If it wasn't for me, the terrace of the bar would be deserted. The leaves on the plane trees are just beginning to take on their autumn colors, a breeze off the River Neva is blowing in through the massive gateway to the Peter and Paul Fortress and directly in front of me rises the almost sheer golden...

Longform

Mount Fuji is considered one of Japan's most iconic symbols and is a major draw for tourists. It's still a mountain, though, and potential hikers need to properly prepare for any climb.
What it takes to save lives on Mount Fuji