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LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA
Feb 23, 2000

Private eyes

On the Net and off, personal data is a currency, an entity that can be bought, sold, bartered and, yes, stolen. Ideally, this information connects companies with potential clients and consumers with products and services. Ads with the precision of surgical airstrikes are swell for advertisers, but on...
JAPAN
Feb 23, 2000

Talks on drilling rights go down to the wire

Staff writer If Arabian Oil Co.'s last-ditch negotiations with Saudi Arabia to renew its 40-year oil drilling rights fail, the pioneer Japanese driller will be hard hit, but officials don't fear a national crisis. With his firm's rights in the Khafji oil field in the former neutral zone between Saudi...
EDITORIALS
Feb 22, 2000

Iran changes -- its own way

Iranians went to the polls last week in the sixth general elections held since the Islamic revolution of 1979. The ballot was the most fiercely contested since the overthrow of the shah, and for good reason: The stakes could not have been higher. Voters knew that a win for reformers could break the religious...
JAPAN
Feb 22, 2000

Ex-fugitive again denies Itoman breach of trust

OSAKA -- Former fugitive real estate developer Heo Young Joong, 52, on Tuesday pleaded not guilty again to charges of causing damage to the defunct trading house Itoman Corp. The Osaka businessman restated the plea when his Osaka District Court trial resumed Tuesday following a 28-month recess caused...
CULTURE / Stage
Feb 22, 2000

Edo Period internationalism: kabuki's Hakata smugglers

The Kabukiza's programs for the month of February offer some of kabuki's biggest stars, including tachiyaku (male leads) Danjuro Ichikawa, Kikugoro Onoe and Kichiemon Nakamura. Jakuemon Nakamura, the distinguished 79-year-old onnagata actor, appears opposite Kichiemon in two plays in the evening program,...
CULTURE / Books
Feb 22, 2000

The mathematics of love and loss

RABBIT OF THE NETHERWORLD, by Reiko Koyanagi. Illustrated by Monica Tamano, translated by Hiroaki Sato. Red Moon Press, 1999, 62 pp., $12 (paper). "Rabbit of the Netherworld" is a unique and often compelling memoir, a fragmentary poetic recreation of the author's wartime childhood and its many painful...
JAPAN
Feb 21, 2000

WHO wants battle against disease on agenda of G8 summit

The World Health Organization has asked Japan to prioritize the battle against infectious and parasitic diseases by placing the topic high on the agenda for the Group of Eight summit in Okinawa this summer, government sources said Monday.
JAPAN
Feb 21, 2000

Election timing to be set with coalition partners: Obuchi

Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi said Monday that he will determine the date for dissolving the Lower House in close consultation with his two ruling coalition partners, keeping alive media speculation over the timing of the next general election.
JAPAN
Feb 21, 2000

Wired new world challenges Japan's old model: U.S. exec

Staff writer The American Management Association leads by example. By adapting its raison d'etre -- to provide business education and management development programs to thousands of companies worldwide -- to the Internet-wired world, the organization is hinting at the direction it believes its members...
CULTURE / Art
Feb 20, 2000

All of life in Daumier's cartoons

A picture is worth a thousand words, and no one knows that better than Honore Daumier. His life story reads like a strand in a novel by Victor Hugo. The poor son of a failed poet and glazier, young Daumier chanced his luck as an artist in Paris in the 1830s. He studied the new technique of lithography,...
COMMUNITY
Feb 18, 2000

Polishing the bitter tears into sweet

Hardly a day passes without some sadness or bitterness touching our lives. Sometimes the waves of grief and pain are relentless.
JAPAN
Feb 18, 2000

Ministry to finance cram school envoys

Pupils don't have to study English at elementary school yet. But over the next year, the Education Ministry plans to spend 180 million yen to help children study the language outside of school on the weekend. Using the requested budget for the next school year starting in April, the ministry plans to...
JAPAN
Feb 18, 2000

Early start on spoken English seen as 'advantage'

Last of two partsStaff writer Many public elementary schools are expected to start teaching English in April when the trial period begins for "comprehensive studies," a new curriculum under the Education Ministry's revised teaching guidelines, that take effect in 2002. From the third grade, schools...
EDITORIALS
Feb 16, 2000

A bridge across the digital divide

The information revolution means nothing to the 3 billion people who have never made a phone call or live on less than 200 yen a day. But as they struggle to survive, the rest of the world moves ahead. The digital divide widens. Fortunately, the decision by Softbank Corp. and a unit of the World Bank...
CULTURE / Books
Feb 16, 2000

Requiem for Asia's resplendent tiger

TIGERS IN THE SNOW, by Peter Matthiessen, with introduction and photographs by Dr. Maurice Hornocker. North Point Press, 154 pp., $25. The tiger is one of nature's most provocative metaphors for power, independence, grace and spirit, but a world consumed with symbols is hardly noticing as the animal...
CULTURE / Books
Feb 16, 2000

The essence of Japanese film

FROM BOOK TO SCREEN: Modern Japanese Literature in Film. By Keiko I. McDonald. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000, 326 pp., with b/w photos. $62.95 (cloth); $25.95 (paper) Keiko McDonald's 1994 "Japanese Classical Theater in Films" (Associated University Presses) has become an indispensable text. Anyone...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Feb 16, 2000

When intercultural humor is no joke

Upon asking a group of Japanese young people, "What's the best way to impress a date?" I once received the following answers:
BUSINESS
Feb 16, 2000

Tax hikes would hurt growth

Japan's economic recovery is gradually gathering impetus, provoking considerable debate on how to control the spiraling budget deficit and put the nation's financial house in order.
COMMENTARY
Feb 15, 2000

Stop the public-works fiasco

In a Jan. 23 plebiscite, voters in Tokushima City, Tokushima Prefecture, gave a thumbs down to a government project to build a gatelock dam on the Yoshino River. My opinion is that the project should be halted because residents do not want it. It's as simple as that.
JAPAN
Feb 14, 2000

Nissan Motor to sell aerospace unit to IHI

Nissan Motor Co. confirmed Monday that it has agreed to sell its aerospace and defense division to Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries Co. as part of its streamlining efforts. The two firms will decide on the cost of the deal, the number of employees involved and other details by the end of July, a...
JAPAN
Feb 11, 2000

BOJ's ultraeasy-credit policy a double-edged sword

As the Bank of Japan carries its zero-interest rate policy into the second year, there is no sign that the policy the BOJ itself calls abnormal will end anytime soon.
JAPAN
Feb 11, 2000

More Japanese urged to join international student forum

The International Students' Committee, organizers of the annual International Management Symposium in St. Gallen, Switzerland, is urging more Japanese business leaders and students to take part in the gathering. Organizers say the symposium has become one of the prime occasions for leaders and top students...
LIFE / Food & Drink
Feb 10, 2000

Whiter than white, cooler than cool

You can't miss Rokko An. It's the flash new place in Nishi-Azabu with the brilliant white concrete facade, on the left as you wend your way down toward Hiroo. From dusk till 4 in the morning it gleams out from a long, low picture-window right across Gaien Nishi-dori from (and totally in contrast with)...
JAPAN
Feb 10, 2000

International student forum needs more Japanese

The International Students' Committee, organizers of the annual International Management Symposium in St. Gallen, Switzerland, is urging more Japanese business leaders and students to take part in the gathering. Organizers say the symposium has become one of the prime occasions for leaders and top students...
LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA
Feb 9, 2000

Enemy of the corporate state

A few months ago while shopping for an iMac DV, I faced a dilemma. It wasn't the matter of sticking with Apple, but about whether I should buy it locally. Aside from issues of availability, price and OS language, there was the DVD bugaboo.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 9, 2000

No call for optimism on N. Korean move

Is North Korea really ready to take the plunge toward better relations with the United States and Japan, or is it a case of deja vu all over again, to quote the immortal New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra? Is the Berlin breakthrough agreeing "in principle" to a high-level North Korean visit to Washington...
LIFE / Travel
Feb 9, 2000

Getting away from the skiers in Kyushu and Kyoto winter

When snow falls and the chill winds blow, skiers are happy but others are inclined to stay home. To lure people away from their warm hearths, the tourism industry offers special winter prices and attractions. This is an excellent time to explore areas of Japan that are on your travel list.
EDITORIALS
Feb 8, 2000

Osaka sends a message to the coalition

Mrs. Fusae Ota, a former official of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, won in Sunday's gubernatorial election of Osaka Prefecture, riding on the strength of the joint support of major political parties. The media have highlighted the fact that she is the nation's first female prefectural...
JAPAN
Feb 8, 2000

Bulletin Board

Youth scholarships aimed at fostering worldly mind-set> The Japan National Committee for United World Colleges, a nongovernmental corporate body, is offering high school students scholarships to study at its institutions around the world to encourage young people to acquire an international way of thinking....
CULTURE / Music
Feb 8, 2000

Music of An-Chang Project best-kept secret of Okiniwa

The new album by Jun Yasuba's A-Chang Project, "Harara Rude," should be heralded as a major new album of Okinawan music. However, Yasuba is at present unknown to even Okinawan music aficionados. It took her two years to sell 500 of the first An-Chang Project albums, "Yarayo-Uta no Sahanji," and at present,...

Longform

Visitors walk past Sou Fujimoto's Grand Ring, which has been recognized as the largest wooden structure in the world.
Can a World Expo still matter? Japan is about to find out.