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BUSINESS / Companies
Aug 19, 2014

Hitachi metals to buy major U.S. foundry

Hitachi Metals Ltd., Japan's biggest maker of magnets containing rare earths, will pay $1.3 billion for Wisconsin-based Waupaca Foundry Inc., gaining four foundries in the company's home state and two others elsewhere in the U.S.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / JAPANESE KITCHEN
Aug 19, 2014

Japan's historic love of corn

The fact that corn or maize has a Japanese name — tōmorokoshi — indicates that it entered the country centuries ago, before it was the norm to import the name of a food as-is and spell it out phonetically (as with tomatoes or asparagus, for instance).
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Aug 19, 2014

Bakka: Neapolitan-style pizza al fresco in the heart of Shibuya

Al fresco pizza and beer. It doesn't get much better than this in the middle of Shibuya. Who cares if your seat is a hard, narrow trestle, the view is an inner-city abandoned lot and the pies are served on flimsy paper plates from the back of a converted delivery van? You don't come to Bakka for home...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Aug 19, 2014

Kewpie adapts its menu to feed a graying nation

Back in 1960, Kewpie Corp. began selling canned baby food, sensing a chance to catch a wave of young families raising kids in an economy roaring back to growth after the devastation of World War II.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 18, 2014

Watch women win more mathematics prizes

Stereotyped notions of what men and women should study at university may be about to change. A U.S. education report shows that — between 2003 and 2009 — men had a higher rate of dropping or changing their majors than women in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 18, 2014

Australia should take lead on global no-first-use convention

There are good reasons why Australia is a credible candidate for leading the push for a global convention to enshrine a universal no-first-use policy for nuclear weapons.
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Aug 18, 2014

Complicated characters: Let us now praise difficult kanji

For beginner and intermediate students of Japanese, encountering a kanji such as 鬱 (utsu, depression) in the wild can be a somewhat traumatic event that, appropriately, induces a deep, introspective depression regarding their language ability. Let's pull out our electron microscopes and examine that...
Japan Times
BUSINESS / Markets
Aug 18, 2014

New 'Bernanke shock' in cards for emerging markets: ex-IMF exec Kato

Emerging markets are at risk of revisiting last year's "Bernanke shock" should the Federal Reserve signal an end to near-zero interest rates earlier than investors anticipate, according to Takatoshi Kato, once a deputy managing director at the International Monetary Fund.
Japan Times
WORLD / ANALYSIS
Aug 18, 2014

Europe struggles with cost of caring for its elderly nuclear plants

Europe's aging nuclear plants will undergo more prolonged outages over the next few years, reducing the reliability of power supply and costing operators many billions of dollars.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 17, 2014

Devastating use of barrel bombs in Syria, Iraq

In spite of a U.N. Security Council resolution banning the use of 'barrel bombs' — a type of improvised explosive device filled with shrapnel, oil and chemicals — both the Syrian and Iraqi governments continue to use them against civilians.
Japan Times
ASIA PACIFIC / Politics
Aug 17, 2014

Cricket star Khan overplays hand in Pakistani power game

Cricket hero Imran Khan rode a wave of discontent to finally break through as a serious player in Pakistani politics in last year's election. Now he is aiming even higher, leading thousands on a march to the capital in a bid to unseat the prime minister.
JAPAN / View from Osaka
Aug 16, 2014

Kepco: the monstrous 500-pound gorilla of Kansai

Last month, Chimori Naito, a 91-year-old former vice president at Kansai Electric Power Co., admitted what was hardly a secret but which put the utility under intense media scrutiny.
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Aug 16, 2014

Home is where the hard work is

Earlier this year, house builder Asahi Kasei Homes produced a video "white paper" based on a survey of 1,371 "double-income families" with children. Seventy percent of the husbands surveyed said they had been subjected to kaji-hara, or "housework harassment," by their wives.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Aug 16, 2014

What kind of life could live in the clouds?

Do you remember seeing clouds from an airplane for the first time? Even if that first time was as an adult, you were probably struck by the appearance of solidity. Seen from above, a cloudscape looks like a landscape — it looks like a place where things might live.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Aug 16, 2014

Punk author Kou Machida on his offbeat samurai story

You wouldn't expect a punk musician to write decent novels, any more than you'd expect a boxer to be good at darning. The talents prized by the former vocation — restlessness, insouciance, hard-wired disregard for authority — don't lend themselves to the rigors of the author's life: all those long,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Aug 16, 2014

The Nobility of Failure

Who hasn't at one time or another suspected that failure is nobler than success? Here the late British historian Ivan Morris celebrates Japanese heroes who refused to make the tawdry compromises success all too often demands. They fail, but fail gloriously, reaping the posthumous reward of deathless...
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health
Aug 16, 2014

Weather systems stalling more often

Summer heat waves and downpours have become more frequent in the northern hemisphere this century, apparently because extreme weather can get trapped for weeks in the same place in a warming world, a study showed Aug. 11.
Events / KANSAI: WHO & WHAT
Aug 15, 2014

Bon bonfires to be lit on five Kyoto mountains

Five mountains in Kyoto will be illuminated with huge bonfires on Saturday, the last day of the Bon festival, when ancestors' spirits are welcomed back to the world of the living.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Aug 15, 2014

Aging WWII veterans fret about shift away from pacifist principles

Tokuro Inokuma, a former Imperial Japanese Army soldier, got his first taste of the horrors of war in 1945 when he scrambled to gather up the scattered limbs of his fellow servicemen, blown apart by a U.S. air raid in Japan. He was 16.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 15, 2014

Race- and religion-based politics slows Asia's progress

How fitting it would be if, on his next return visit to Asia, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry — on behalf of America's first African-American president — helped to push the region, including China, to move beyond the racial and ethnic stereotypes that are constraining economic growth.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 15, 2014

Vodka: market riches after communism's fall

Early on, Russia's Yeltsin government (1991-1999) imposed heavy tariffs on the import of medicines and staples while granting societies of the handicapped and sports clubs the ability to import vodka without tariffs. It marked a new era in the country's economic history.

Longform

Koichi Tagawa’s diary entry from Aug. 9, 1945, describes the day of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
The horrors of Nagasaki, in first person