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COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Apr 15, 2012

Is Putin's 'roof ' going to keep out the hard rains of his falling popularity?

Putin's in a pickle and Russia's in the soup. At least that's what many who write about the "Dear Leader" and his country seem to be saying. But is it so? Certainly there is disruption, the kind of disruption that sits just below the skin, breaks out into turmoil, then all but disappears from sight —...
CULTURE / Books
Apr 15, 2012

Competent fiction

THE TOMB IN THE KYOTO HILLS AND OTHER STORIES, by Hans Brinckmann. Strategic Book Publishing, 2011, 150 pp., $12.95 (paperback). The five stories that constitute Hans Brinckmann's "The Tomb in the Kyoto Hills" are all competent. The prose seldom obtrudes on the reader's consciousness; the characters...
JAPAN
Apr 14, 2012

Infighting unlikely but media impact was tops: expert

U.S. experts on North Korea said Friday's failed launch will probably not create leadership conflicts in Pyongyang, but that if the true purpose of the launch was to whip up a world media frenzy, it succeeded brilliantly.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Apr 13, 2012

'John Carter'

Just in time for the 100th anniversary of its first publication, "Tarzan" author Edgar Rice Burroughs' "A Princess of Mars" gets the 3-D blockbuster treatment from Disney under the revised title "John Carter." This new franchise should have been a sure thing, with a novel that has endured in readers'...
JAPAN
Apr 10, 2012

Vaunted missile shield more for show than protection

With Aegis destroyers and Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles deployed and standing by, Japan's military appears ready to shoot down any debris from North Korea's rocket — or even the rocket itself — should it threaten the country this week.
COMMENTARY
Apr 10, 2012

World Bank could use a competitive advantage

From a turn of phrase by Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs in 2001, a grouping was born in 2009. BRICS (Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa) make up two-fifths of the world's population, one-fifth of world gross domestic product and one-seventh of world trade. Yet, they account for two-thirds of...
CULTURE / Books
Apr 8, 2012

Buddhist wisdom and questions of science

Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice, by B. Alan Wallace. Columbia University Press, 2011, 304 pp., $27.95 (hardcover) This book is a stirring attack on the hubris and blind spots of the scientific establishment, combined with an engaging presentation...
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Apr 8, 2012

Procreation begets problems for pandas

Just how cute are giant pandas? The public can't get enough of them. The star attractions at Ueno Zoo in Tokyo are Ri Ri and Shin Shin, a male and female pair who helped attract some 4.4 million visitors last fiscal year — the highest number for 19 years.
Reader Mail
Apr 5, 2012

Expressions of religious belief

For a second, I had hoped that Paul Gaysford's April 1 letter, "Sentiment that does not console," was just an April Fool's joke. Gaysford rebukes Megumi Watanabe for saying, in her March 29 letter ("Hope for 3/11 survivors"), that the children who died in the March 11, 2011, disasters are watching us...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Apr 1, 2012

Yomiuri vs. Asahi in war over Giants' broken paycap agreement 'scoop'

On March 15, the Asahi Shimbun reported that the Yomiuri Giants baseball team paid huge amounts of money in contract-signing bonuses to several rookies, in violation of an agreement signed by all 12 Japan Professional Baseball teams. The payouts took place from 1997 to 2004, and involved six players...
CULTURE / Books
Apr 1, 2012

Fiction that binds: Japan's hope after disaster

Kizuna: Fiction for Japan, edited by Brent Millis. CreateSpace, 2011, 228 pp., $15.99 (e-book) It's no coincidence that the Chinese character chosen to represent the most expressive sentiment of the year in Japan, one that signifies hope after disaster and misery, was kizuna, meaning a bond of fraternity....
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Mar 31, 2012

A guide to Jizo, guardian of travelers and the weak

"Jizo Bosatsu has confirmed you as a friend on Facebook," said the email. I clicked on "view profile," which took me to Jizo's Facebook page. Not much information was revealed, except that his religious views are Buddhist, and he has 409 friends. His profile picture is a stone Jizo statue sitting peacefully...
COMMENTARY
Mar 27, 2012

The cracks in the BRICS

As it prepares to hold its latest annual summit in New Delhi on March 28-29, the BRICS grouping — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — remains a concept in search of a common identity and institutionalized cooperation.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / OUR PLANET EARTH
Mar 25, 2012

A woman of wisdom among the energy mandarins

Ask me who should facilitate Japan's energy dialogue and the choice is easy: Junko Edahiro.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / Japan Pulse
Mar 23, 2012

Rich Japanese flavors for lean times

Japanese foods are getting more flavorful as budgets get leaner.
COMMENTARY
Mar 23, 2012

Bowing out with a farewell of great expectation

What was most amazing to Westerners at least -and perhaps, especially, to the Chinese people — was that his comments were broadcast live on official China TV. After all, his official observations weren't exactly pretty. Here is the back-story.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink
Mar 23, 2012

Cherry blossom captures the flavor of spring

The Japanese love affair with the cherry tree and its pink, fragile sakura blossoms is world renowned. Every spring, the nation eagerly awaits for the first pink buds to appear on bare branches. The sakura zensen, or cherry-blossom opening front tracked by Japan's meteorological agency, shows where sakura...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 21, 2012

Goldman Sachs has a long history of duping its clients

Greg Smith doesn't know the half of it.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 20, 2012

Mistaken presumptions about Assad's Syria

Syria's uprising against President Bashar Assad, which began peacefully in Damascus a year ago, has become increasingly brutal and splintered. As the death toll nears 9,000, calls for international intervention have increased — but what worked in places like Libya won't necessarily succeed in Syria....
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 19, 2012

Syrian crisis shadowed by outcome in Libya

As the conflict in Syria churns out a ghastly human carnage, diplomatic efforts to halt the violence are shadowed by last year's intervention in the Libyan conflict, which resulted in a six-month-long military operation to topple a tyrant.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Mar 18, 2012

Yu Darvish under the magnifying glass

Barring a major natural catastrophe, war or government upheaval, the vernacular news headlines for the next several months are almost certain to be dominated by baseball. Specifically, former Nippon Ham Fighters hurler, Yu Darvish, who on April 8 is scheduled take the mound in his first start for the...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 16, 2012

Is Burma's reintegration with the West for real?

In a world beset by war, ethnic conflict and humanitarian disasters, Burma (aka Myanmar) seems one of those rare places where diplomats can say they are making a positive difference.
COMMENTARY
Mar 15, 2012

Ocean acidification: another problem with CO₂ emissions

We tend to measure time by the span of a human life, making a century seem like an era and a millennium a mega-stretch of time. In this perspective, a million years is an eternity. So it can be revealing to consider our place in geologic history measured in hundreds of millions of years.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Mar 15, 2012

Tokyo's expansion west, and further

With the first anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake just passed, an awareness of Japan's earthquake-prone nature is very much with us. But destructive as earthquakes are, they can also serve as catalysts for social, economic, and cultural change. This seems to be the premise of the exhibition...
CULTURE / Art
Mar 15, 2012

Tokyo's expansion west, and further

With the first anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake just passed, an awareness of Japan's earthquake-prone nature is very much with us. But destructive as earthquakes are, they can also serve as catalysts for social, economic, and cultural change. This seems to be the premise of the exhibition...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 14, 2012

A wakeup call Japan ignored

At 2:46 p.m. Sunday, March 11, my family and I joined millions of Japanese standing silently at a Buddhist temple or a Shinto shrine. With heads bowed, we remembered the events of one year earlier, when our house swayed for nearly three minutes and the power died. In the Tohoku region, several hundred...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 14, 2012

Sending the wrong message to North Korea

Another food crisis has spread across North Korea, caused by yet another poor harvest and Pyongyang's disastrous currency manipulation scheme, which wiped out the savings many people had used to feed themselves. We do not know how many people are dying, but it is not as bad as the famine of the 1990s,...
CULTURE / Books
Mar 11, 2012

Fear of conforming effects a perspective on sex

TOWARD DUSK AND OTHER STORIES, by Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, translated by Andrew Clare, introduction by James Dorsey. Kurodahan Press, 2011, 219 pp., ¥1600 (paperback). When the house in which Junnosuke Yoshiyuki grew up burned down, Lawrence Rogers tells us, "he fled the flames with only his Debussy records...
COMMENTARY
Mar 6, 2012

Hamas' perilous maneuvers

Despite all of Hamas' assurances to the contrary, a defining struggle is taking place within the Palestinian Islamic movement. The outcome of this struggle — which is still confined to polite political disagreements and occasional intellectual tussle — is likely to change Hamas' outlook, if not fundamentally...

Longform

Figure skater Akiko Suzuki was once told her ideal weight should be 47 kilograms, a number she now admits she “naively believed.” This led to her have a relationship with food that resulted in her suffering from anorexia.
The silent battle Japanese athletes fight with weight