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JAPAN
Jan 4, 2001

Public wants coalition dropped a peg

Forty percent of the Japanese electorate hopes the House of Councilors election scheduled for July will end in a tie between the ruling and opposition parties, and 87 percent would like to directly elect the prime minister, according to a Kyodo News poll released Wednesday.
JAPAN
Jan 4, 2001

House fires in Gunma, Miyagi kill two

Two people were killed in separate fires in Gunma and Miyagi prefectures, one late Tuesday night and the other early Wednesday, police said.
LIFE / Style & Design / BEAUTY EAST AND WEST
Jan 4, 2001

Festive citrus delights to brighten up the new year

If there is a companion plant to the evergreen that is so characteristic of this time of year, it must be the orange or one of its immediate relatives: the tangerine, the clementine, the mandarin, or even the citron or grapefruit.
BUSINESS
Jan 3, 2001

Virtual marketplace moves next door

Stop by a neighborhood liquor shop a few months from now and chances are it will offer TVs, refrigerators and thousands of other items for either home delivery or later on-the-spot pickup.
JAPAN
Jan 3, 2001

Reform fledgling offspring of 'lost decade'

During the bubble economy of the late 1980s, few could have predicted the acute banking crisis and long economic malaise that have typified the past decade.
JAPAN
Jan 3, 2001

Asian women's fund to seek out businesses, labor unions

The cash-strapped Asian Women's Fund, which collects contributions for women forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, has decided to call on businesses and labor unions for financial assistance, informed sources said Tuesday.
CULTURE / Art
Jan 3, 2001

The simple pleasures of Karatsu

KARATSU, Saga Pref. -- Best known for its deceptively simple pottery, Karatsu is a peaceful coastal town on a western tip of Kyushu. It's quiet year round except for summer, when holidaymakers crowd the long sandy beaches nearby, and November, when several hundred thousand visitors flock to see giant,...
JAPAN
Jan 3, 2001

Unresolved issues linger for Japan

Japan greets the new century with two major diplomatic issues unresolved since the end of World War II -- concluding a peace treaty with Russia and normalizing diplomatic relations with North Korea.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Jan 3, 2001

Kicking up a stink about smelling as natural as a skunk

While beauty traditionally belongs to the beholder's eye, correct hygiene might be better ascribed to his or her nose.
JAPAN
Jan 1, 2001

State-backed Internet expo kicks off

The government-sponsored virtual Internet exposition, an event for the new millennium, went online Sunday.
EDITORIALS
Jan 1, 2001

The rebuilding starts now

At the dawn of a new century, the Japanese seem to be looking to the future with more worry than hope. The realities of contemporary Japan are grim. The nation seems to have lost its way. The social and economic systems that raised it to unprecedented levels of prosperity are falling apart at the seams....
BUSINESS
Jan 1, 2001

Economy expected to limp toward recovery

The consensus among economists at private think tanks is that the economy will continue to grow, albeit slowly, for the remaining three months of fiscal 2000 and through the next fiscal year.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 1, 2001

New opportunities for Japan-U.S. ties

The administration of U.S. President-elect George W. Bush will include many pro-Japanese officials. This reflects U.S. political history. Many officials of President Bill Clinton's administration had served under President Jimmy Carter, who came to power 12 years earlier. For example, former Secretary...
CULTURE / Books
Jan 1, 2001

Odd echoes of the Meiji Restoration

JAPAN'S EMERGENCE AS A MODERN STATE: Political and Economic Problems of the Meiji Period, by E. Herbert Norman, 60th Anniversary Edition, edited by Lawrence T. Woods. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, Sept. 2000, 336 pp., $75 (cloth), $25.95 (paper). It's hard to fault E. Herbert Norman's analysis of Japan....
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 1, 2001

A question of hegemony

An implicit alliance has emerged in Washington since the Cold War's end between avowedly "Wilsonian" liberals, anxious to extend American influence and federate the democracies, and unilateralist neoconservative believers in U.S. power projection, who call for American world leadership, aggressively...
CULTURE / Film
Jan 1, 2001

Yang offers up portrait of 'real' family life

Family dramas are a movie staple, but few have the texture of real family life, in which individual destinies unfold and interact in ways too messy and complex for the usual movie ad copy. What we usually get instead is either melodrama or caricature -- i.e., something that can be easily packaged and...
JAPAN
Dec 31, 2000

Cities set to merge divided over new leader

It looked like a match made in heaven when, on Aug. 10, the two beaming mayors of Hoya and Tanashi shook hands on a deal to merge the two western Tokyo cities.
JAPAN
Dec 31, 2000

Guesthouse making enemies of tenants and neighbors

Advertisements for Apple House Co., a chain of low-budget guesthouses, tout it as the "biggest guesthouse in Japan" and play up its "no curfew, no key money and no guarantor required" policy.
JAPAN
Dec 31, 2000

Less cash kept over yearend period

Households, firms and financial institutions will keep estimated funds of 63.39 trillion yen on hand during the yearend holiday period, down 3.1 percent from a year earlier for the first fall in eight years.
JAPAN
Dec 31, 2000

EPA boss received 15 million yen from KSD

Economic Planning Agency chief Fukushiro Nukaga received a total of 15 million yen in donations in November 1999 and last April from the then chairman of KSD, a scandal-tainted mutual aid organization for small firms, informed sources said Saturday.
JAPAN
Dec 31, 2000

Warbler recalls area's innocent days

Just when the doors of the Yamanote line train are about to close at Uguisudani Station during morning rush hour, alert passengers will hear the distinctive chirp of the "uguisu," or bush warbler.
EDITORIALS
Dec 31, 2000

Politicians fail to deliver

Japanese politics in 2000 was marked by two major milestones. One is the inauguration of the administration of Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori following the late Keizo Obuchi's resignation due to sudden illness. The other is the July 25 Lower House election in which the governing Liberal Democratic Party...
COMMENTARY
Dec 31, 2000

Flaws are part and parcel of democracy

LONDON -- How democratic are the world's so-called democratic countries? Can there be totally fair elections?
CULTURE / Art
Dec 31, 2000

The art of being a farm village

"Grez was an idyllic little place," wrote a Swedish artist in 1884, "offering subjects wherever you looked . . . the river with its watermills and little waterfalls, the sun on white walls, old men in clogs, old women in coifs, girls in the sunshine, hens and ducks, grazing cattle, groves, fields and...
JAPAN
Dec 30, 2000

Nikkei flirts with two-year low as 2000 trading draws to gloomy close

The Tokyo Stock Exchange on Friday bid farewell to 2000 with the main gauge falling enough to flirt with a two-year low.
JAPAN
Dec 30, 2000

Children of Asahara forced to pay for guru's alleged crimes

RYUGASAKI, Ibaraki Pref. -- Watching them play on the floor amid scattered toys and books, it's hard to believe that these two boys were once hailed by thousands of Aum Shinrikyo members as holy children and heirs to their guru's legacy.
JAPAN
Dec 30, 2000

LDP lawmakers try to quell non-Japanese suffrage moves

A group of Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers has urged local LDP chapters to revoke local assembly resolutions that favored a bill to give permanent non-Japanese residents voting rights in local elections.

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