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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.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WORDS TO LIVE BY
Aug 15, 2014

A dog's life should be a good one

Nao Yokoo, 34, trains and walks dogs in Tokyo. She also provides pet-sitting services, for which she stays at clients' homes and takes care of their dogs while they are out of town. Nao has never met a pooch she didn't love immediately and her mission in life is to make more dogs happier.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 15, 2014

China outsourcing its dirty work to U.S. military

There's little that the Chinese government likes less than the projection of U.S. military power, yet Beijing offers grudging support for U.S. efforts to safeguard Iraqi sovereignty with airstrikes against Islamic State jihadists.
BUSINESS / Economy
Aug 15, 2014

GPIF law change may be shelved, Kihara says

A law to transform how the world's biggest pension fund is run can wait and may even be shelved, said a ruling party official, contradicting his deputy policy chief who called it the top priority.
BUSINESS
Aug 14, 2014

Eurozone growth grinds to a halt

The eurozone's economy unexpectedly stalled in the second quarter of the year, dragged down by shrinking growth in Germany and stagnant France, ringing alarm bells about the health of the bloc's economy as it braces for impact of sanctions against Russia.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Aug 14, 2014

Pixies to bring 'Indie Cindy' to Summer Sonic

Sat on the upper deck of his band's tour bus, Pixies frontman Black Francis shrugs his shoulders and screws up his face. This is, I've come to realize, how the man born Charles Thompson IV tends to field questions before, if and when the fancy takes him, forcefully making his point — a technique strangely...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 14, 2014

How Japan's art inspired the West

In the decades after Japan was forcibly opened to large-scale international trade in the early 1850s, a fever spread across Europe for items from the exotic country: its textiles, ceramics, paper fans, woodblock prints and more. Meanwhile, the term "Japonism" was coined to describe works made in Europe...
EDITORIALS
Aug 14, 2014

Don't hide the harsh reality of war

As the number of survivors of the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings falls below 200,000, it is becoming increasingly difficult for younger generations to understand the horror of war experienced by Japan's victims, whose average age is 79.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Aug 14, 2014

Build strong Japan-India ties without taking aim at China

In Tokyo and New Delhi, there are people seeking to elevate Indo-Japanese relations to the status of a de facto alliance and to pursue a strategy of encircling China.
WORLD
Aug 14, 2014

U.S. military team lands on Iraq's Mount Sinjar where Yazidis are trapped

A team of U.S. military and humanitarian aid personnel landed on Iraq's Mount Sinjar early on Wednesday to assess how to evacuate thousands of civilians under siege from Islamic State fighters, a U.S. official said.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Aug 14, 2014

Chinese authorities fine Fuji-Q copyright violator

A local Chinese authority in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, has punished the operator of a spooky house for copyright violations involving Japanese amusement park Fuji-Q Highland in Yamanashi Prefecture, NHK reported Thursday.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 13, 2014

Tavarataivas (365 Nichi no Simple Life)

Perhaps you are aware of the tiny house movement, where people move into a teensy-tiny house with the barest of amenities, or Project 333, where people choose to dress with only 33 items for three months or longer. Both have gained significant interest over the last few years as more people in the so...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 13, 2014

Bajari (Gypsy Flamenco)

As the world becomes more digitized, human beings begin to seem much less physical. Sometimes it feels as though people have no clue what to do with their bodies anymore. But in Barcelona's Gypsy community, the flame of Flamenco burns as brightly as it did in the 18th century, when dancers and singers...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 13, 2014

Almost Human

Language: English

Longform

An illustration features the Japanese signs for "ganbare" (good luck) and the Deaflympics, which will be held between Nov. 15 and 26.
A century of Deaf sport finds its moment in Tokyo