Search - life

 
 
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / TELLING LIVES
Jul 22, 2014

Linking Japan, Ukraine via songs

Nearly 20 years have passed since Nataliya Gudziy visited Japan for the first time, when she performed live with fellow members of the Ukrainian folk dance ensemble Chervona Kalyna, or Red Viburnum, named after Ukraine's national symbol.
CULTURE / Music
Jul 22, 2014

Panicsmile opt for a back-to-basics approach on 'Informed Consent'

For more than 20 years now, Panicsmile has been an unsung hero in Japanese rock.
JAPAN / EXPLAINER
Jul 21, 2014

Selective consumption tax weighed

It's only been three months since the consumption tax was hiked to 8 percent, but the ruling coalition is already expediting talks on another increase scheduled to come into effect in October next year.
Japan Times
WORLD / Politics / FOCUS
Jul 18, 2014

As Scotland decides, not all Scots get a say

Ruth McPherson was born and educated in Scotland but left to work in London two years ago and so has no say on whether her native country should end three centuries of union with England.
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 16, 2014

Parisians hail beauty of Nomura's oeil de boeuf

Mansai Nomura’s recent staging of “Macbeth” at the Maison de la culture du Japon in Paris drew a varied and enthusiastic audience.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jul 15, 2014

YMO's Yukihiro Takahashi recruits Towa Tei, Cornelius, Yoshinori Sunahara, Tomohiko Gondo and Leo Imai for an impressive supergroup

One of the unspoken rules in the progress-fixated world of electronic music is that you don't get bonus points for dwelling on past glories. So when Yukihiro Takahashi — drummer, vocalist and dapper elder statesman of electro-pop — convened a star cast of musicians at Tokyo's Ex Theater Roppongi...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE FOREIGN ELEMENT
Jul 14, 2014

From Yokosuka rape to U.S. court victory, 'Jane' commits her 12-year ordeal to print

Rape victim Catherine Fisher reveals the story behind her 12-year fight with the U.S. military and Japanese authorities in her new book, 'I am Catherine Jane.'
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jul 12, 2014

The high cost of peace and quiet

Peace and quiet! How rare it is, how precious. Why rare? Because a full-blooded modern economy is no monastery, no "ancient pond" into which a frog may jump, producing the hushed "sound of water" immortalized by the haiku poet Basho (1644-94).
Japan Times
ASIA PACIFIC
Jul 12, 2014

Ex-South Korean 'comfort women' for U.S. troops sue own government

Cho Myung-ja ran away from home as a teenager to escape a father who beat her, finding her way to the red light district in a South Korean town that hosts a large U.S. Army garrison.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 11, 2014

Public asked to help build moving giant Gundam

The life-sized Gundam figurine in Tokyo's Odaiba district is an impressive sight as it towers a full 18 meters above its visitors and has grown into a popular tourist attraction since it was erected in 2009.
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health
Jul 11, 2014

Mississippi girl believed cured of HIV no longer in remission

A toddler thought to have been cured of HIV now has detectable levels of the virus in her blood, the child's doctors and U.S. health officials said Thursday.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 10, 2014

Angelina Jolie takes evil to new places in 'Maleficent'

Websites such as Buzzfeed have made an art of the "listicle," a news article that comprises a top 10 on a designated topic. Thanks to childhood nostalgia, Walt Disney characters often make their way onto such listicles, and a quick look at the Top 10 Disney villains of all time often ends with one woman...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / LAW OF THE LAND
Jul 9, 2014

Under Abe, Japan reconnects with the world of harm

It would be tragic if the process Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has set in motion destroys one of the truly great things about Japan: the fact that so little of its economy and society is devoted to harming other people.
COMMUNITY / Voices / COMMUNITY CHEST
Jul 7, 2014

Letters: adoption from Japan, book bores, returnees, workers' rights and fleeing U.S. guns

Some letters in response to recent articles in the Community section about a wide range of subjects.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Jul 7, 2014

High test scores, low expectations

Young people in Japan, like their counterparts in the U.S., know that high scores on tests have little to do with their job prospects. So why do a higher percentage of American students still report being hopeful about their prospects for a good life?
Japan Times
JAPAN / GENERATIONAL CHANGE
Jul 7, 2014

Future leader shows promise with African aid work, British schooling, and Japan politics in sight

When Doga Makiura arrived in Rwanda in 2012, the 18-year-old was amazed to find not the stains of the 1994 genocide, but a tidy airport, impressive high-rises and welcoming people.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Jul 5, 2014

Off the beaten path on Japan's paper trail

At a little roadside store in rural Nagano, a foreign tourist is miming a rice bowl with her cupped left hand. Firm in the belief that Japanese washi (paper — wa meaning Japanese and shi meaning paper) was made from rice, she waves her flattened right hand across the "bowl," miming her desire for "sheets"...
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK
Jul 5, 2014

Entertaining guests with a little horseplay

I had returned from a three-month trip to the Canadian Arctic and was in Vancouver, meeting up with family and friends before returning to Japan.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jul 5, 2014

A firsthand account of vice and profit in Edo

Riding the circular Yamanote Line on a Sunday in Tokyo, it is easy to daydream. Those who have found themselves at times wondering what the city might have been like in the past are likely to enjoy the aptly named "Lust, Commerce, and Corruption: An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard, by an Edo Samurai,"...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jul 5, 2014

From the Japanese

This fourth volume of poetry from Tokyo resident Paul Rossiter conveys his 40-year relationship with Japan in collected poems both thoughtful and thought-provoking. These range from the impressions of a startled first-time tourist in 1969 through to Rossiter's visits to Ishinomaki in Tohoku in December...
Japan Times
CULTURE
Jul 3, 2014

Happy birthday, Sailor Moon!

In 1992, a 14-year-old Japanese girl set out to save our universe from total annihilation.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 2, 2014

Babylon still trembles at Jamaica's cult classic

Flashback: It's midnight at the Orson Welles Cinema, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980. Perry Henzell's breakthrough Jamaican film "The Harder They Come" has been playing here every weekend for nearly a decade now, but tonight it's still a full house. As the lights go down, the audience sparks up, and within...
Japan Times
WORLD / Politics
Jul 1, 2014

Toronto Mayor Ford exits rehab, says was in 'complete denial'

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford said Monday that he had been in "complete denial" about his drinking and drug use before entering a rehabilitation clinic two months ago, and admitted that his struggle against substance abuse will never end.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 30, 2014

'Black money' fairy tale drives Indian adults

Millions of adult Indians enthusiastically propagate a fairy tale that says once a strong government brings billions of dollars of 'black money' home, India will cease being poor and take its rightful place among the superpowers of the world.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Society
Jun 29, 2014

Comic books champion debate on Fukushima disaster

Farmers in Fukushima try to convince skeptical visitors that their crops are safe from radiation. Blood trickles from the nose of a reporter who visits the area.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jun 28, 2014

Mori classic was the epitome of Meiji style

There has been no period in the history of modern Japanese society so dramatic and so remarkably tumultuous and fluid as the Meiji Era (1868-1912), and no single work of fiction more revelatory in its depiction of that period than Ogai Mori's "The Wild Goose." Now we have, in Meredith McKinney's just...
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Jun 28, 2014

When a physical wasteland bred a moral wasteland

He lived by fire and he died by fire. He was vile — coldblooded, amoral, ruthless. He was the man his time called for, and the man his time called forth — a vile time, by most standards. Its name is Sengoku Jidai, a period of prolonged civil war. Oda Nobunaga (1534-82) is its most representative...
EDITORIALS
Jun 27, 2014

Legal tussle over parental ties

Japan's Supreme Court next month is scheduled to hear two cases that challenge the traditional legal presumption of a father-child relationship when DNA test results deny the existence of blood ties.

Longform

After the asset-price bubble crash of the early 1990s, employment at a Japanese company was no longer necessarily for life. As a result, a new generation is less willing to endure a toxic work culture —life’s too short, after all.
How Japan's youth are slowly changing the country's work ethic