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Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / NAME OF THE GAME
Nov 21, 2002

Beware of twists ... and shouts

One chestnut some claim to be the shortest complete piece of fiction goes like this: "The last man on earth sat in his room. There was a knock on the door."
JAPAN
Nov 20, 2002

Crimes set record high, arrests record low in '01

Last year saw a record 2.74 million Penal Code violations, excluding traffic offenses, up 12 percent from 2000, but the arrest rate fell to a postwar low of 19.8 percent, the government reported Tuesday, adding that although foreigners committed a small percentage of the crimes, their offenses were models...
COMMENTARY
Nov 20, 2002

North Korean motives fan speculation

SEOUL -- I have given a series of lectures on U.S. Asia policy in the weeks since the revelation about North Korea's secret nuclear weapons program. While the audiences and locations in South Korea, Japan and the United States have varied widely, the questions have been remarkably similar. Along with...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Nov 20, 2002

Getting emotional as the Sagacho closes its doors

Last Friday evening, as a waxing moon arced low across a clear autumn sky, more than 600 people made what for most would be their final pilgrimage to the Mecca of Tokyo's contemporary art scene. Alone or in clans -- some boisterous, others silent -- they crossed the Sumida River, wound their way through...
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 19, 2002

Protectionism threatens global economy

LONDON -- Japan's current row with China over steel exports is symptomatic of a growing retreat from the free trade aims that underpinned international growth in the last two decades of the 20th century. It is now a year since members of the World Trade Organization set themselves the task of reducing...
BUSINESS / ON MANAGEMENT
Nov 19, 2002

Seagram's fall from grace is testimony to virtue of stockpiling crown jewels

When Shakespeare wrote, "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" he was talking about royalty, but I'm sure the travails of today's business elite would have attracted his attention. The recent demise of the House of Seagram, for instance, might be worthy of a play -- the tale of how a third-generation...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / NATURE TRAVEL
Nov 19, 2002

Seeking spiritual succah in the Negev desert

The largest natural crater in the world has a past almost as awe-inspiring as its present.
BASEBALL / MLB
Nov 18, 2002

Matsui exits on low note

"Godzilla" left his old stomping grounds with more of a whimper than a bang Sunday afternoon.
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 18, 2002

China afflicted by illegal flights of capital

While China continues to attract much of the foreign capital that comes into Asia's emerging market economies, it appears these inflows are increasingly needed to offset capital flight. A flood of unregistered outflows from China has been compounded by the difficulty in tracking outbound movements of...
JAPAN
Nov 18, 2002

Flu vaccination linked to muscle-wasting disease

Five people in Japan suffered Guillain-Barre syndrome -- a disorder of progressive muscle weakness -- after receiving influenza vaccinations between January 2000 and April 2002, health ministry officials said Sunday.
JAPAN
Nov 18, 2002

10 trillion yen sought for extra budget

Calls were made Sunday for an extra budget totaling at least 10 trillion yen for the current fiscal year to shore up the anemic economy.
EDITORIALS
Nov 18, 2002

Good neighbors to diversity

Japanese are increasingly waking up to find that their new neighbors are foreigners who have settled in this country. What should be done to build an affluent multicultural society in Japan? The Sapporo District Court recently handed down a ruling that makes us think about this question. Three foreigners...
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 18, 2002

Only bitter solutions remain in Chechnya

LIMASSOL, Cyprus -- Europeans have a way of knowing what's best for other peoples' conflicts but facing their own crises with ineptitude, and there is no better demonstration of this than their attitude to the war in Chechnya.
JAPAN
Nov 17, 2002

Finance firm exec held over racketeer payoffs

A senior managing director of leading Japanese consumer credit firm Nippon Shinpan Co. was arrested Saturday with seven other people for allegedly paying off a former racketeer.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Nov 17, 2002

Movers and shakers behind the scenes

For journalists and valued customers, the Tokyo Collections are all about the spectacle of the shows. For buyers from Tokyo's department stores and boutiques, they are epic spending sprees -- business gambles founded on knowledge and experience laced with intuition.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Nov 17, 2002

Make tracks to the new-look Yurakucho

Have you noticed the recent changes around Yurakucho Station? As fancy new cafes and restaurants pop up one after another, the tiny old izakaya under the railroad tracks, with their red paper lanterns, are gradually disappearing.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Nov 17, 2002

Menswear in the spotlight

Menswear at the Tokyo collections was, as usual, sparsely represented. Just a handful of designers sent any male models out onto the runways. And as for shows devoted solely to menswear, only Kohshin Satoh (for the Arrston Volaju brand), Kiminori Morishita (showing his own diffusion label within the...
COMMENTARY
Nov 16, 2002

Dark days for Britain's Tories

LONDON -- The once-mighty Conservative Party, which dominated the British political scene for most of the 20th century, has now fallen on very bad times.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Nov 16, 2002

Former Tokushima governor given suspended prison term

The Tokyo District Court sentenced former Tokushima Gov. Toshio Endo to a suspended three-year prison term Friday and fined him 8 million yen for bribery.
Japan Times
JAPAN / PREFECTURAL FARE
Nov 16, 2002

Fukushima tourist office gives natives taste of home

Kotaro Takamura's poem about a homesick woman in Tokyo pining for her native Fukushima Prefecture more than 60 years ago could just as easily have been written about many of the displaced locals living in the capital these days.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Nov 16, 2002

A whole lot of shaking going on in my mind

Earthquakes are not laughable affairs. The breadth of the destruction and depth of the human tragedy demand only a solemn response.
JAPAN
Nov 16, 2002

Cabinet official hits ministry for refusing to issue Lee visa

A government official on Friday criticized the Foreign Ministry for refusing to issue a visa to allow former Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui to visit Japan.
SOCCER / PREMIER REPORT
Nov 15, 2002

New coach, new approach has Wales in hunt for Euro 2004

LONDON -- Question time.
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 15, 2002

Trade pact could trap ASEAN into state of irrelevance

HONOLULU -- Supporters of the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area (ACFTA) argue that numbers tell the story. And indeed, they do.
BUSINESS
Nov 15, 2002

BOJ credit-easing measures likely: experts

Nearly 90 percent of economists expect the Bank of Japan to further ease its grip on credit within six months, according to a Kyodo News survey released Thursday.
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Nov 15, 2002

Putting Japan's first bilingual WP to the test

In my previous installment, I noted that Toshiba launched the first dedicated Japanese-language word processor in 1979. Five years later, the Japan subsidiary of MicroPro International Corporation, publisher of WordStar, the pioneering English word processing software, was preparing to launch "WordStar...
JAPAN
Nov 14, 2002

Six people to receive organs from brain-dead donor

OSAKA -- Doctors across Japan began a series of operations Wednesday morning to transplant organs from a man in his 30s who was pronounced brain dead the day before in Wakayama, according to Japan Organ Transplant Network officials.

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