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Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 24, 2012

'Prometheus'

My high school English teacher once assigned an essay on Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." She was pushing the idea that the novel was one big Jesus allegory, with its hero McMurphy dying for the salvation of the other patients, but I couldn't agree. Kesey had worked in a mental institution,...
COMMENTARY
Aug 22, 2012

Brother of Thai leader upholds a feisty profile

Thaksin Shinawatra is undoubtedly the most controversial politician ever to become prime minister of Thailand, an oft-ignored country in Southeast Asia with a population and landmass greater than Britain or Italy. (But who besides a Thai knows this?) Elected several times in national elections deemed...
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / TECH_JAPAN
Aug 22, 2012

Japanese companies aspire to take a bite out of the e-reader apple

With so many competitors in the tablet and e-reader market these days, it's getting harder and harder for manufacturers to differentiate themselves from similar offerings. Apple's iPad held 68 percent of the worldwide market share in the second quarter according to Massachusetts-based research firm IDC,...
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 21, 2012

Whose future is it anyway?

Singapore's paternalistic government is unappealing to many Americans — media restrictions, one-party rule, harsh penalties for gum-chewing.
CULTURE / Books
Aug 19, 2012

Nursery rhymes that fly high with sound and color

JAPANESE NURSERY RHYMES: Carp Streamers, Falling Rain, and other Traditional Favorites, by Danielle Wright and illustrated by Helen Acraman. Tuttle Publishing, 2012, 32 pp., $16.95 (hardcover) With its many onomatopoeic words, the Japanese language booms and trills, echoing with musical lingo. Usually...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Aug 19, 2012

Monster parents make matters worse for their children and teachers

In the West they hover and swoop. In Japan they stalk and are known to strike. We all have them and some of us have been them. And in recent years the media, both social and antisocial, have put them under the magnifying glass of criticism.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 16, 2012

Spillover could force Washington to consider how to end Syria's war

"The beginning of wisdom," a Chinese saying goes, "is to call things by their right names." And the right name for what is happening in Syria — and has been for more than a year — is an all-out civil war.
JAPAN
Aug 16, 2012

Cesium in those near No. 1 rated low, now

Researchers have found very low amounts of radioactivity in the bodies of about 10,000 people who were living near the Fukushima No. 1 power plant when three of its reactors melted down.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 16, 2012

Five myths about Obama's economic stimulus

President Barack Obama's February 2009 stimulus bill, the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, was a political disaster. It helped fuel the Republican revival of 2010 and now stars in Mitt Romney's ads. The president even stopped uttering the word "stimulus."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / INSIDE ART
Aug 16, 2012

New MoMA show promises to put Tokyo, and Japan, on the world art map

Local commentators have long bemoaned Japanese art historians' apparent inability to contextualize their country's artistic output within the global art-history narrative. Thank goodness for MoMA.
COMMENTARY
Aug 14, 2012

China betting on wrong side in Syrian conflict

On the weekend before last, the United Nations General Assembly voted, 133 to 12, for a resolution that condemned the violence in Syria and called for a "political transition that meets the aspirations of the Syrian people."
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 13, 2012

Don't blame Glass-Steagall repeal for the crisis

When the Titanic set sail from Southampton on April 10, 1912, bound for New York, it was called "unsinkable." This was before that chance encounter in the North Atlantic with a large iceberg. You know how that movie ended.
CULTURE / Books
Aug 12, 2012

For the sake of survival: concealing the cross

In Search of Japan's Hidden Christians: A Story of Suppression, Secrecy and Survival, by John Dougill. Tuttle Publishing, 2012, 272 pp., $22.95 (hardcover) When you travel with a mission, a theme in mind, encounters unfold, stories are forthcoming, history uncoils. John Dougill begins his own journey...
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 11, 2012

Egypt's new old government

Egypt's first-ever freely elected president, the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi, has appointed his first Cabinet, and guess what? It is crammed with officials from the old regime.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 10, 2012

'Kirishima, Bukatsu Yamerutteyo (The Kirishima Thing)'

High schools are mercilessly hierarchical societies. At mine in rural Pennsylvania varsity basketball players occupied the summit. (Football players didn't because we didn't have a football team.) For a mere honor student to absent-mindedly sit in the "reserved" seat of one of these titans in the lunch...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 9, 2012

From Comme des Garcons to Somarta, Japanese fashion excels at weaving past, present and future

In 1981, while Western designers focused on shoulder-padded power suits, bright colors, sharp stiletto heels and statement jewelry, Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garcons' Rei Kawakubo sent their models down the runway in defiant black, voluminously draped garments, accessorized with nothing but flat shoes....
COMMENTARY
Aug 7, 2012

Wedding gift for the first couple of North Korea

I guess I am a sucker for old-fashioned romance. When I heard about the stunning marriage of Kim Jong Un, the young new leader of North Korea, to the lovely Ri Sol Ju, apparently a professional singer, I hurriedly buried the ideological hatchet and grabbed the latest BRIDES magazine to figure out what...
CULTURE / Books
Aug 5, 2012

Strange tales emanating from the jungles of Southeast Asia

Border Run, by Simon Lewis. Scribner, 2012, 240 pp., $24.00 (hardcover) Slash and Burn, by Colin Cotterill. Soho Crime, 2012, 290 pp., $25.00 (hardcover) "I've always loved that classic noir staple — of doomed characters trying to get away with a crime and just digging themselves further into a hole,"...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Aug 5, 2012

Steamy, sleepless nights grind down the nation

Sleeping-goods manufacturer Nishikawa Sangyo Co. Ltd., founded in Omi Province (modern-day Shiga Prefecture) in 1566, got its start in business selling mosquito netting. The company's Tokyo retail outlet, on the opposite side of the Nihonbashi Bridge from the Mitsukoshi department store, has been in...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 3, 2012

'7 Días en La Habana (7 Days in Havana)'

Just last week this column trotted out the movie industry's defense — post-Colorado "Batman" shootings — that films don't influence actual behavior. Now along comes "7 Días en La Habana (7 Days in Havana)," a raucous compendium film that features scene after simmering scene of people getting righteously...
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 2, 2012

Speculative bubbles without financial markets

A speculative bubble is a social epidemic whose contagion is mediated by price movements.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 1, 2012

The abandoned economist

Milton Friedman, the combative, impish free-market economist, died in 2006, too early to witness and diagnose the financial crisis of 2008 and the long economic slump we've experienced since. But that doesn't mean he's absent from the debate over how to handle it.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 31, 2012

China appears to be losing its diplomatic grip

In 2016, China's share of the global economy will be larger than America's in purchasing-price-parity terms. This is an earth-shaking development; in 1980, when the United States accounted for 25 percent of world output, China's share of the global economy was only 2.2 percent. And yet, after 30 years...
Japan Times
LIFE
Jul 29, 2012

The Taisho Era: When modernity ruled Japan's masses

"Democracy is so popular these days!" — "The Democracy Song," 1919
Japan Times
LIFE
Jul 29, 2012

Revolution was in the air during Japan's Taisho Era, but soon evaporated into the status quo

In the summer of 1918, "rice riots" swept the country. They began in a fishing village on the Sea of Japan in remote Toyama Prefecture. By September, some 2 million people in hundreds of municipalities had taken to the streets. They looted, bombed, demonstrated, struck.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Jul 29, 2012

A heavenly retreat amid the bustle of Kyoto

On my first visit to the ancient pond garden of Kajuji, it took me a devil of a time just to locate it. Alighting at Ono, a subway stop on Kyoto's Tozai line, there was nothing to suggest the area might be of interest to visitors, that it could have any serious historical or cultural credentials.
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jul 29, 2012

In our time of global aggression we could learn from the 'Land of Sorry'

Back in 1991, I was offered a tenured position at a university in Kyoto. Needless to say, this was a big step for me and my family, who were all looking forward to settling into Kyoto life.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / EVERYMAN EATS
Jul 27, 2012

How cheap cuisine can save your town

Shigeru Tamura looks remarkably trim for someone whose hobby is eating fried noodles. Over a lunch at a yakisoba restaurant on the backstreets of Tokyo's Shibuya Ward, the 49-year-old author and law professor admits he dines out as often as twice a day. Then he pushes aside his plate of noodles and pulls...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 27, 2012

'Take This Waltz'

It's the season of chaotic sensations and somber reflections. "Take This Waltz" feels so right at this time of year, if only to remind us of one of life's basic facts: What starts off as something new and shiny will eventually get old and rusty. A bowl of peaches left on the table is already speeding...

Longform

Visitors walk past Sou Fujimoto's Grand Ring, which has been recognized as the largest wooden structure in the world.
Can a World Expo still matter? Japan is about to find out.