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SOCCER / PREMIER REPORT
Oct 29, 2005

Contrast in Liverpool's performance an ongoing mystery

LONDON -- There are many unanswered questions in the world.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Oct 29, 2005

Joji and the flagon: a 'Flactured Fairy Tale'

Man can learn much from myths. For example, one thing I learned from the myth of Sisyphus was never to name my kid Sisyphus.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Oct 29, 2005

New Asian Collection gallery is dream come true

Robert Tobin makes charismatic progress around the back side of Ebisu Station in central Tokyo.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Oct 27, 2005

The man in black

For a man whose entire cinematic career has been devoted to portraying maladjusted types who don't fit in, Tim Burton is certainly comfortable holding a microphone in front of a crowd. Then again, that is the deal with artists: turn your oddities and idiosyncrasies into art and watch your childhood rejection...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Oct 25, 2005

Japan sees beginning of change

Writer Alex Kerr first came to Japan in 1964, since when he has worked as a translator, art dealer and in real estate during the "bubble" economy.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Oct 22, 2005

Professional Design Solutions on a steady incline

There is a small graphic on Jeremy D. Thomson's name card that says a lot about him: two light bulbs inspired by Thomas Edison, who in failing hundreds of times chose to see the experience as having learned hundreds of ways not to make a light bulb.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Oct 16, 2005

Willam Empson, 'The tale of Genji' and the Westerner's view of Japan

WILLIAM EMPSON: Volume I -- Among the Mandarins, by John Haffenden. Oxford University Press, 2005, 695 pp., 16 illustrations, £30 (cloth). Author of several major critical works, notably "Seven Types of Ambiguity" (1930) and "Some Versions of the Pastoral" (1935), William Empson (1906-1984) was also...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Oct 14, 2005

Bending genderand kicking butt

Parinya Charoenphol is no stranger to Japan. Back in 1998 when she was a Muay Thai champion, Parinya had flown over to fight against wrestler Kyoko Inoue at the Budokan, in an extremely rare, mixed-gender match-up. The tickets were sold out months in advance. Parinya recalled being taken aback when Japanese...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Oct 8, 2005

Kanazawa to Hayama for workshop and concert

A flute in full blow draws me to a Taisho-period building behind the Catholic church in Hayama. A window is open, and whoever is playing sounds pretty good to this amateur.
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Oct 4, 2005

Hidden wisdom of 'the guv,' Shintaro Ishihara

Adored by large sections of the Japanese public, reviled in equal measure by the foreign community and courted tirelessly by the domestic media: There are few more divisive figures in Japan today than Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara.
EDITORIALS
Sep 25, 2005

No face-off, please

Medical controversies have a way of making fence-sitters of even the most opinionated among us. Assisted suicide, life support, late-term abortions: We listen to the practical and ethical pros and cons on such issues and end up incapable of holding a view for longer than 10 minutes.
BUSINESS
Sep 16, 2005

An overview of latest insurance sector scandal

Earlier this month, several Japanese nonlife insurance companies owned up to a raft of payment failures relating to automobile and fire insurance claims.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 15, 2005

Independent brushstrokes

A commonly heard accusation is that Japanese oil painters are followers rather than innovators. It is a criticism that has been made against many early adopters in this country -- be they filmmakers, fashion designers, chefs or rock musicians -- and one that has even come from painters' compatriots....
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WORDS TO LIVE BY
Sep 13, 2005

Arihiro and Kimiyo Fujita

Arihiro Fujita and Kimiyo Fujita, owners of the award-winning Takasagoya Pork Shop in Tokyo's Tsukishima, know their pork. These two 65-year-olds also know what makes a relationship work. They've been married and working together for 40 years -- without, they claim, even one argument.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Sep 7, 2005

Salaryman nightmare, otaku dreams

Playwright David Mamet was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for his play "Glengarry Glen Ross." Two years before that, however, an earlier, major work, "Edmond," had fared less well with the critics.
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Sep 4, 2005

The aged better off heading for the hills on their limited pensions

The main opposition parties claim that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's attempt to make the upcoming Lower House election a referendum on postal reform is simply a scheme to deflect public attention away from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's fiscal failures under his leadership. Consequently,...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Sep 3, 2005

El Haddawi seeks sensational Bavarian waterfall

On any normal day, Thomas Farnbacher can wave to his partner, Ingo Taleb-Rashid, across Lake Chiemsee in Bavaria. "I live one side with my wife and children in a small village. Rashid lives on the other. The lake is too big to see one another, of course. But we know we are there."
CULTURE / TV & Streaming / CHANNEL SURF
Aug 21, 2005

Meet the ultimate luckless woman in TBS's "Monday Mystery Theatre" and more

More an existential comedy of errors than a bona fide mystery, this week's "Monday Mystery Theatre" (TBS, 9 p.m.) is about a woman whose bad luck is almost hilariously morbid. In "Un no Nai Onna: Saigo no Tanjobi (The Luckless Woman: Last Birthday)," a woman named Satomi (Sachiko Sakurai) is celebrating...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Aug 20, 2005

Lessons learned over the rainbow

Late August marks the anniversary of my arrival in Japan, this time totaling 28 years. So the question would seem to be, "What have you learned, Dorothy, in your long stay over the rainbow?"
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Aug 7, 2005

Learning a foreign language is a cultural journey, too

English students of Japan, unite! You have nothing to lose but your (conversation school) chains!
BUSINESS
Aug 4, 2005

Nonpaid benefit cases top 10,000

Property and casualty insurance companies, including the nation's top six firms, failed to make payouts to policyholders in more than 10,000 cases -- worth several hundred million yen -- over the past three years due to computer glitches and human error, industry sources said Wednesday.
EDITORIALS
Jul 31, 2005

Rescue from property sharks

Fraudulent and malicious sales methods victimizing innocent people have become a social issue. In a typical case, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department arrested four former salesmen last month on suspicion of having cajoled or pressured some 5,400 people in 34 prefectures into signing contracts for...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Jul 30, 2005

Michiyo Durt-Morimoto

Eleven years ago, Michiyo Durt-Morimoto did not go on her usual visit to Europe. She wrote to her longtime teacher in Belgium that she was preparing a book on her 25 years of artistic production. He replied that the book would mark the completion of only one period of her life, a "prelude of what is...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jul 24, 2005

Strangelove encounters of a MAD scientist kind

Herman Kahn is back in the news.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Jul 23, 2005

Sathya Saran

"I think I am a good writer. That's the only skill I have," said Sathya Saran on a visit to Tokyo from Bombay.
LIFE / Travel
Jul 22, 2005

Foreign writer who defined Japan has been carved into stone in Matsue

The name usually means nothing whatsoever to the vast majority of people overseas. But in his adopted country, Lafcadio Hearn is lionized among writers in the English language with the same kind of reverence normally accorded to authors of the ilk of Melville and Shakespeare.
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Jul 21, 2005

Beauty: Japanese women's never-ending quest

Elsewhere in the world women are concerned about politics, social issues, family, warfare or simply survival. In Japan, it seems their interests are centered on just one thing: bi (beauty).
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Jul 21, 2005

Birds of no feather

It's a strange fact but true, that if you hike regularly in the Japanese mountains, you'll see some amazing sights -- and I don't mean just magnificent scenery.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jul 10, 2005

Existential dilemma from the Japanese wasteland

TOWARD MEANING: Poems of Kikuo Takano, translated by Hiroaki Sato. Middletown Springs, Vermont: P.S., A Press, 2004, 116 pp., $12 (paper). Kikuo Takano (born 1927) first wrote poetry in the bleak postwar years and is said to have burned his initial output. Aligning himself in 1953 with Ayukawa Nobuo's...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 7, 2005

Hungry underclass growing

There is a pain in the belly of Africa that just will not go away. It is gnawing at our development goals and undermining our economies. It is blighting the lives of the young and shortening the life span of the old, yet somehow it is being forgotten. What is this scourge that stalks our continent? A...

Longform

A sinkhole in Yashio, which emerged in January, was triggered by a ruptured, aging sewer pipe. Authorities worry that similar sections of infrastructure across the country are also at risk of corrosion.
That sinking feeling: Japan’s aging sewers are an infrastructure time bomb