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COMMENTARY
Apr 1, 2010

The single-currency disease

It seems only yesterday that leading Japanese industrialists who had heavy (and very welcome) investments in the United Kingdom were calling for the pound to merge with the euro in one grand continental currency.
COMMENTARY
Mar 31, 2010

Why China kills a chicken to scare monkeys

It may be that Zhu Rongji is the most important Chinese political figure since the death of Mao Zedong's relatively enlightened successor Deng Xiaoping, I don't know. As China's previous premier (number two of the whole place) he was certainly the key technical engineer of China's audacious and epochal...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 31, 2010

The pope's Easter mystery

HONG KONG — As more than a billion Roman Catholics prepare to commemorate the most sacred mysteries of their faith culminating at Easter next Sunday, most eyes will be on the small elderly man in the Vatican palace to see whether he can steer the church through the turbulence tearing it apart.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 31, 2010

Can Turkey fulfill its trans-Atlantic promise?

WASHINGTON — The Turkey that German Chancellor Angela Merkel visits this week is a very different place from the Turkey that began European Union accession talks five years ago. For, with those talks seemingly going nowhere, Turkey has begun to broaden its international horizons. Indeed, Turkish foreign...
EDITORIALS
Mar 31, 2010

Tough times for pro sports

While sporting events like the Olympic Games attract a tremendous amount of attention globally, domestic sporting contests are of at least equal importance to society. Unfortunately, Nippon Professional Baseball and J. League are both in the midst of financial woe. It would be a great shame if these...
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Mar 31, 2010

Take your taimingu when translating loan words

The English translation of the manga "Death Note" by Tsugumi Ōba has sold millions of copies around the world — with barely a mention anywhere of the glaring translation error in the title and throughout the work: "Death Note" should in fact be "Death Notebook."
COMMUNITY / How-tos / LIFELINES
Mar 30, 2010

Quick questions, answers

Some quickies:
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / VIEWS FROM THE STREET
Mar 30, 2010

What's your favorite hanami memory?

EDITORIALS
Mar 29, 2010

Sound of street enterprise

Once upon a time, Tokyo's streets were filled with pushcart vendors selling every imaginable item. Those fabled days are making a comeback, with small startup companies and hardworking individuals plying Tokyo's streets selling food and small goods in many parts of the city. The resurgence of these vendors...
EDITORIALS
Mar 29, 2010

Holes in diplomatic history

A Foreign Ministry panel of experts on March 9 announced, among other things, that Tokyo and Washington had "tacitly agreed" that port calls or transit by U.S. Navy ships carrying nuclear weapons did not constitute the "introduction" of nuclear weapons, an action that had to be cleared first by consultation...
JAPAN
Mar 28, 2010

Bangladeshi envoy heads home

Bangladeshi Ambassador to Japan Ashraf-ud-Doula leaves for home Sunday feeling satisfied with the commencement of "tangible and substantial" bilateral trade and investment relations.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / OUR PLANET EARTH
Mar 28, 2010

Sea change: Can science, sense turn the tide?

In "The Tempest," William Shakespeare writes of a human body deep beneath the waves undergoing "a sea-change into something rich and strange," transmuting into coral and pearls.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / BACKSTREET STORIES
Mar 28, 2010

Thatched spring in Setagaya

To slough off winter sluggishness and get into step with spring, I set a course from Seijo Gakuen-mae on the Odakyu Line to Jidayubori Minkaen — a compound of late-Edo Period (1860s) thatched farmhouses in Tokyo's Setagaya Ward — and ending at Futako Tamagawa Station, about 4 km away as the crow...
CULTURE / Books
Mar 28, 2010

Writer's idle hands drawn to dirty work

In Paul Theroux's 1977 short story "Diplomatic Relations," an American diplomat in Malaysia receives a letter from a female colleague, his former lover, warning of her impending visit. Their reunion in a Singapore hotel is brief and awkward, and the diplomat's sentiments, summed up in the final line...
Japan Times
LIFE
Mar 28, 2010

Letter from Rapallo

Aug. 12, 1940

Longform

Once smoky, male-dominated spaces, today's net cafes, like Kaikatsu Club, are working to make their operations more attractive to women customers.
The second life of Japan's net cafes