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Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle / ON THE BOOK TRAIL
Jun 12, 2003

"Ned Mouse Breaks Away," "The Devil's Toenail"

"Ned Mouse Breaks Away," Tim Wynne-Jones, Groundwood Books; 2003; 192 pp. If you were caught playing with your spinach -- or worse, using long, stringy bits of it to write "I hate what Mom makes me eat" -- what would happen? You'd probably get grounded for a few days, right? But imagine if you got locked...
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Jun 5, 2003

Losing your mind may produce great art

Inevitably, we learn a lot about ourselves when something goes wrong. By studying what happens to people afflicted by various forms of brain degeneration, for example, we have learned a lot about how the brain works. This generally means that by understanding what goes wrong when specific parts of the...
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
May 29, 2003

Best to remember this

A couple of years ago the British artist Damien Hirst explained why he now lays off alcohol: "Blackouts. I used never to get blackouts. . . . I was walking around in the morning, and they'd be going, 'You did this.' Did I? I couldn't even remember the violence."
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
May 11, 2003

Koreans make good moves

THE KOREAN DIASPORA IN THE WORLD ECONOMY, edited by C. Fred Bergsten and Inbom Choi. Washington D.C.: Institute for International Economics, Special Report 15, January 2003, 180 pp., $25 (paper) In recent years, increasing attention has been given to the social and economic role of diasporas -- communities...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
May 11, 2003

English 'samurai' feted in a hostile land

Anyone who's read James Clavell's "Shogun," or seen the TV mini-series of the same name, is already indirectly acquainted with William Adams, the first Englishman to settle in Japan after a solitary ship of the Dutch trading fleet he was piloting drifted ashore in present-day Oita Prefecture in April...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
May 11, 2003

Changes in consumer concerns

CONSUMER POLITICS IN POSTWAR JAPAN: The Institutional Boundaries of Citizen Activism, by Patricia Maclachlan. Columbia University Press, New York, 2002, 270 pp., $18.50 (cloth) This excellent study richly evokes the struggle and frustrations of Japanese consumer organizations in the post-World War II...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
May 7, 2003

One door opens, another one closes

"The closing of a door can bring blessed privacy and comfort -- the opening, terror. Conversely, the closing of a door can be a sad and final thing -- the opening a wonderfully joyous moment."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
May 7, 2003

Come on, come on, let's get together

There's collaboration in the air in Japan's contemporary theater world; collaboration between foreign directors and Japanese actors, directors and producers.
ENVIRONMENT / OUR PLANET EARTH
Apr 24, 2003

Feedback

Dear readers, as you rarely get the last word, this week's column aims to put that right. Two weeks ago, I wrote about the dangers of our society's addiction to oil, and noted that much of the world still believes the primary purpose of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was to dominate its oil supplies and establish...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Apr 20, 2003

Dancing detectives

A LOYAL CHARACTER DANCER, by Qiu Xiaolong. New York, SOHO Press, 2002, 351 pp., $25 (cloth) Popular fiction can be a fairly reliable indicator of changing public sentiments. One harbinger that the Cold War was beginning to wind down was the appearance of the now-famous police procedural novel. Such novels...
JAPAN
Apr 15, 2003

Yahoo to heed personal data ruling

Yahoo Japan Corp. will not appeal a court ruling ordering it to identify a person who posted an allegedly slanderous message on a Yahoo Internet bulletin board, company sources said Monday.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Apr 13, 2003

Laying the ghosts of doubt in Laos

LOST OVER LAOS, by Richard Pyle and Horst Faas. Da Capa Press, 2002, 239 pp., $30 (cloth) In American hands, the deadly serious business of warfare, the very way war is conducted, can seem at times more like an extension of its own pop culture, a cartoon warp of the real grotesqueries.
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 10, 2003

War fuels Saudi fears and anger

RIYADH -- You won't find the newly published "Hatred's Kingdom" in any Saudi bookshop, but it is in such demand among high officials that the government has brought out a reprint of its own. Its author is Dore Gold, a hardline Israeli spokesman. According to him, the "hatred" in question is rooted in...
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Apr 10, 2003

Immune system linked to mating habits

David Beckham might wear a sarong and Takuya Kimura of SMAP may sometimes wear lipstick, but in humans, most males are dull compared to the females. In other animals, of course, the opposite is true: it is the males that are showy, brightly colored, flashy.
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Apr 3, 2003

An egg's just a sniff away from the battling sperm

Not many of us have won a marathon . . . hell, most of us would struggle to even finish one. But even the least competitive, most couch potato-like among us are the result of winning the most difficult of races in the most appalling of conditions: the race between sperm in an ejaculate to fertilize a...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Mar 30, 2003

Lock & key

KAZUYOSHI UEHARA -- not the Kazuyoshi Uehara -- rang the doorbell. He sensed a pause, a hesitation, an interrupted action -- his imagination no doubt -- and tensed slightly as approaching footsteps grew audible.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Mar 30, 2003

Was WWF3 a washout for citizens' rights?

While the outbreak of war in Iraq may have disrupted proceedings at the Third World Water Forum being held in Kansai, it also lent them deeper significance.
JAPAN
Mar 23, 2003

Ishihara's team fears war may affect Tokyo election

Aides and officials managing Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara's re-election campaign are concerned that the U.S.-led war in Iraq may adversely affect the Tokyo gubernatorial election, while his rivals see it as a good chance to promote their peace policies.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music / PLAY BUTTON
Mar 23, 2003

A beautiful day in the life of sound

The phone line buzzes, the electric heater drones and the pitter-patter of rain can be heard in the background. Not the perfect sonic environment for a phone interview, but for Yuko Kitamura, it is perfect.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Mar 23, 2003

Art on the fast track

OK, so manga are hugely popular -- but so are 500 yen umbrellas on a rainy day. Like those cheap plastic parapluies, though, manga seem little more than a temporary feature of daily commuting. Those young furiita and salarymen who thumb through the pages with barely a pause can't be getting much from...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Mar 19, 2003

The conductor, his wife, her lover

A recent survey by Theater Guide magazine put Koki Mitani ahead of even Shakespeare as the dramatist best known in Japan.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Mar 4, 2003

Sealing the deal on public meetings

You might have heard recently about Tama-chan, a cute sea lion frequenting Yokohama rivers. He became so popular that the city threw him an unprecedented fish: an honorary Certificate of Residency ("juminhyo").
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Mar 2, 2003

Modernization seen from the bottom up

A MODERN HISTORY OF JAPAN FROM TOKUGAWA TIMES TO THE PRESENT, by Andrew Gordon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, 384 pp., $35 (cloth) In this superb book, by far the best in its genre, Andrew Gordon, director of the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies at Harvard University, provides a...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Feb 28, 2003

Celebrated geisha's tell-all a hot item

The mystery of the geisha, with their painted faces and elaborate kimono, has long been a source of fascination for people worldwide. But it has also led to fantasies and misunderstandings about their true roles.
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Feb 27, 2003

How much pain can your brain take?

Japanese TV became famous abroad in the 1980s and created an image of Japan for outsiders that still lingers. The shows were the gaman taikai (endurance contests), where members of the public carried out tasks in which they suffered pain: The winners were the ones who endured the most.
COMMENTARY
Feb 17, 2003

Fears of 'anti-Americanism' overblown

MANILA -- In 1996 Samuel Huntington published his epochal work "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order." In it, he argues that, since the demise of the Cold War, cultural divides have become the focal points of international conflicts. Judging from recent editorials in American and...
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 9, 2003

U.S. test of U.N. relevance

Time was when those threatening to go to war had to prove their case beyond reasonable doubt. Today we are asked to prove to the powerful, to their satisfaction, why they should not go to war. The U.N. inspectors don't have to prove that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction; Iraqi President Saddam Hussein...
EDITORIALS
Feb 9, 2003

Newer, smarter sentinels

There is no new thing under the sun, said the quotable author of Ecclesiastes a few thousand years ago. Won over by its pith and poetry, we have always regarded that statement as self-evidently true. Lately, though, we have begun to wonder if the exact opposite isn't the case. Sometimes it seems as if...
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 7, 2003

Ancient voices, timeless tales brought back to life

CHIANG MAI, Thailand -- "Thai" or "Tai"?
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Feb 2, 2003

How the 'modern' code was cracked

The headless body of a woman in her 50s was laid on a straw mat inside a hut at Kotsukahara in Edo's Senju area. Born in Kyoto and nicknamed "Aochababa," sketchy court records indicate the woman had been convicted of killing her adopted children. She had been executed by beheading that very morning,...

Longform

A small shrine perched atop rocks braves the waves hitting the shoreline during a storm in Shimoda, Shizuoka Prefecture. The area is under threat of a possible 31-meter-high tsunami if an earthquake strikes the nearby Nankai Trough.
If the 'Big One' hits, this city could face a 31-meter-high tsunami