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COMMENTARY / World
Oct 23, 2009

A day to act in the name of planetary justice

PRINCETON, N.J. — What we are doing to our planet, to our children and grandchildren, and to the poor, by our heedless production of greenhouse gases, is one of the great moral wrongs of our age. This Saturday is a day to stand up against this injustice.
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital
Oct 21, 2009

Kindle confident in face of challenging Japanese market

Amazon.com Inc. has made its electronic-book reader, Kindle, available in Japan, whose e-book market has grown sharply in the past few years.
CULTURE / Books
Oct 18, 2009

Classic tales of newsprint noir

While a senior at Tokyo's Sophia University, 23-year-old Missouri native Jake Adelstein was heading home from a Shinjuku cinema when, on a whim, he dropped into a game arcade and popped u00a5100 into the slot of a fortunetelling robot for some mystical career advice.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Oct 18, 2009

Wildlife on your doorstep

To be brutally honest, wildlife photography is mostly about having the means to get to amazing places, where wildlife still abounds. Then it takes heaps of patience. And the final ingredient is a good eye to capture the moment.
LIFE
Oct 11, 2009

Fake names were to the fore in many a rise from humblest to highest

Here's a beguiling irony: Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-98), architect of Tokugawa Japan's rigid class structure and the author, in 1587, of a firm ban (not firmly enforced) on surnames for commoners, was himself born without a surname.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Oct 10, 2009

Fundraising Japanese hanga print exhibition coming up

A Tokyo-based women's volunteer group — now in its 60th year of activity — is holding an annual fundraising show of print works next week.
CULTURE / Film
Oct 9, 2009

Osamu Dazai: genius, but no saint

Major Japanese cultural figures often become subjects of films when big birth or death anniversaries roll around. The hero (far more rarely, the heroine) is usually portrayed as a sainted genius, tragic or otherwise. Osamu Dazai, however, was one such figure who didn't fit the saint template.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / BY THE GLASS
Oct 9, 2009

Introducing the Californian dream

Swilling an elegant Pinot around your glass, the landscape before you, verdant with vines, undulates in the soft evening light. The little wine you've imbibed sets your senses aglow as you contemplate the cinematic beauty of California's wine country.
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 6, 2009

Time to acknowledge benefits of migration

BANGKOK — Amid the economic recession, lost jobs and ever greater burdens on health care and other public services, migration has become a hotly debated issue in many of the countries that attract migrants.
COMMENTARY
Oct 6, 2009

Challenges for China concern political future, not economics

NEW DELHI — Six decades after it was founded, the People's Republic of China has made some remarkable achievements. A backward, impoverished state in 1949, it has risen dramatically to now command respect and awe — but such success has come at great cost to its own people.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHO'S WHO
Oct 6, 2009

'Outsider' shares unique take on life, prejudices in the 'real' Japan

As a "blonde-haired, blue-eyed" American woman living in the rural farmlands of Tokushima Prefecture with a Japanese husband and their twin children, one with hearing disabilities, author and novelist Suzanne Kamata has gained a unique perspective on life in Japan.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 2, 2009

The dogu have something to tell us

LONDON — They are, according to their kanji, part earth and part spirit, somewhere between animal and human. They are dogu, the most remarkable products of Japan's Jomon Period, a Neolithic era before the advent of rice cultivation, when the Japanese archipelago supported higher population densities...
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 30, 2009

Irish voters weigh the Lisbon Treaty again

MAYNOOTH, Ireland — On Oct. 2, Irish voters go to the polls for a second time to decide whether to adopt the European Union's Lisbon Treaty. The mood in EU capitals is one of nervousness as polling day looms, with the future of the EU in the hands of Ireland's unpredictable voters. On two of the last...
CULTURE / Books
Sep 27, 2009

Murder with hefty history

PAPER BUTTERFLY, by Diane Wei Liang. Simon and Schuster, 2009, 227 pages, $24.00 (hardcover) Reviewed by Mark Schreiber Mei Wang, the Beijing-based female private investigator who made her first appearance in "The Eye of Jade" (2008), is back. Burned out by the demands of her job in the Ministry of Public...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Sep 27, 2009

Is it better to end in 'beautiful madness' than quicksands of banality?

On the morning of Sept. 18, 1939, a man and a woman walked into a woodland that was then in eastern Poland. They took a cocktail of drugs. When the woman woke up several hours later, the man was dead. He was buried the next day not far away.
CULTURE / Books
Sep 27, 2009

The ink-stained road: impressions of Japan

JAPAN THROUGH WRITER'S EYES, edited by Elizabeth Ingrams. Eland, 2009, 336 pp., $29.95 (paper) Reviewed by Stephen Mansfield Recent years have seen a number of excellent anthologies of writings on Japan, including "Japan: True Stories of Life on the Road" and the superb "Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Sep 27, 2009

Denied bear necessities of life

About a week ago, while browsing the Internet, I came across a headline at the BBC Web site that made me pause: "Bear injures 9 at bus terminal." The first thought that crossed my mind was, "Why was a bear waiting for a bus?"
CULTURE / Art
Sep 25, 2009

Observing the pieces of a fragmented self

From an overwhelming slew of art, literature, music, cinema and theater references, there seems to emerge a provisional feel for order in William Kentridge's filmic worlds: worlds created between the artist and spectators' activity in constructing narratives from discrete fragments. How this materializes...
Reader Mail
Sep 24, 2009

Tarnishing the image of Sri Lanka

Brahma Chellaney, in his Sept. 19 article, "Colombo risks squandering Sri Lanka's hard-won peace," seems to deliberately try to mislead Japanese readers about the ground situation in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka just managed to save itself from one of the most savage terrorist outfits the world has ever known....
LIFE / Digital
Sep 23, 2009

Can firms trust cloud computing?

This year's overhyped IT concept is cloud computing. Also called software as a service (SaaS), cloud computing is when you run software over the Internet and access it via a browser. Both Google Docs and salesforce.com's customer management software are examples of this.
CULTURE / Books
Sep 20, 2009

Ramen memoir goes down easy

THE RAMEN KING AND I: How the Inventor of Instant Noodles Fixed My Love Life, by Andy Raskin. Gotham, 2009, 293 pp., $26 (hardcover) "The year I was a student at International Christian University . . . Japan's automated-teller machines were open only during regular bank hours — weekdays from nine...
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 18, 2009

Japan's harmonious drift

PARIS — Forget what you have heard about the hardworking Japanese salaryman: Since the early 1990s, the Japanese have slackened their work habits.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Sep 18, 2009

'Infinite moments' brought to stage

Seminaked men, shaven-headed, their bodies covered in white makeup, move with intent slowness on the stage: Anyone who has ever seen Ankoku Butoh — Japan's most famous dance export — will recognize this description. But, as good as the likes of internationally acclaimed dance troupe Sankai Juku are,...
Reader Mail
Sep 17, 2009

Pollution by industrial China

In his Sept. 10 letter, "Hardly a Western phenomenon," Barry Ward said things I wanted to say (with regard to the Bengal Famine in 1943). However, both he and Dipak Basu, author of the Aug. 27 letter "Who represents the Western spirit?," missed one very important point: Despite there still being plenty...
JAPAN
Sep 17, 2009

Okada to prioritize ties with Asian neighbors

To envision how Katsuya Okada will approach his new job as foreign minister, one need look no further than his grilling of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi during budget deliberations at the Diet on June 2, 2005.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 17, 2009

Foreign policy and the democratic paradox

PARIS — Elections stolen in Iran, disputed in Afghanistan and caricatured in Gabon: Recent ballots in these and many other countries do not so much mark the global advance of democracy as demonstrate the absence of the rule of law.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 15, 2009

Wal-Mart's sensible turnabout on health care

LOS ANGELES, LOS ANGELES TIMES — Is Wal-Mart turning blue — blue enough to pull President Barack Obama's health care chestnuts out of the fire?
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Sep 13, 2009

Road map for increasingly accessible world of Japanese cinema

JAPANESE CINEMA, by Stuart Galbraith IV. Taschen, 2009, 192 pp., 354 photographs, $29.99 (hardcover) This is a large (23.1 cm by 28.9 cm), fully illustrated account of Japanese film from its beginnings. There have now been a number of such histories, each perforce written from different perspectives...

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