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COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Feb 3, 2013

Citizens' lack of resolve leaves nuclear door wide open for next disaster

Second of two parts
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Feb 1, 2013

Canadian uses sports as bridge to teaching, writing, understanding

Writer, teacher and sports fan Trevor Kew, 32, pedals and kicks his way through culture shock. He uses sports to help him adapt to unfamiliar cultures or new places when traveling, trusting his bike or a soccer ball to bridge the gap with locals.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / BACKSTREET STORIES
Jan 26, 2013

Mining gems in Okachimachi

On early maps of Edo, as Tokyo was known prior to 1868, Okachimachi is rendered as a town (machi) densely packed with the tiny dwellings of okachi — low-ranked, poorly paid samurai infantry.
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Jan 26, 2013

No room for subtleties when laying off workers

Thanks to a feature that appeared on the front page of the Dec. 31 issue of the Asahi Shimbun, oidashi beya is the first topical neologism of 2013 if you don't count "Abenomics." It's not clear if the term, which translates as "expulsion room," was coined by the newspaper, but since then the blogosphere...
JAPAN / Politics
Jan 25, 2013

Wherever the wily Ozawa goes, party soon to follow

Veteran lawmaker Ichiro Ozawa, who bolted from the Democratic Party of Japan dur- ing its recent rule, launches his sixth new party and formally becomes its president.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Jan 25, 2013

Can the discovery of oil save Ecuador's rainforest?

American biologist Kelly Swing thwacks a bush with his butterfly net and a dozen or so bugs and insects drop in. One is a harvester, or daddy-long-legs, another a jumping spider that leaps onto a leaf where two beetles are mating.
Japan Times
WORLD
Jan 25, 2013

U.S. Mumbai plotter avoids death but gets 35 years for cooperation

Chicago AFP-JIJI
Japan Times
BUSINESS / Tech
Jan 25, 2013

I still haven't found what I'm looking for ...

Thinking about Google over the last week, I have fallen into the typically procrastinatory habit of every so often typing the words "what is" or "what" or "wha" into the Google search box at the top right of my computer screen. Those prompts are all the omnipotent engine needs to inform me of the current...
Japan Times
Events / Events In Tokyo
Jan 24, 2013

A monk's teenage angst can be monstrous

Monsters and runaways aren't usually the kinds of problems teenagers face, but a Tokyo-based theater troupe thinks these are the kinds of conundrums that await teenage monks.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jan 24, 2013

With 'Desh,' Khan proves you can go home again

If art's purpose is to ask the relevant questions, then British-Bangladeshi dancer Akram Khan successfully interrogates humanity — and himself — with his latest production, 'Desh.'
Reader Mail
Jan 23, 2013

Big expense for selective gain

Regarding William Noll's Jan. 17 letter, "Olympics bid a waste of money": I, too, strongly oppose hosting the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 23, 2013

The art and poetics of a domestic environment

Jaws dropped as American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, arriving in Japan in the 1980s, named Yasujiro Ozu as one of the directors he was most inspired by. Ozu, active from the 1920s up to the 1960s, was then considered old fashioned for his slow pace and lack of movement, and for the middle-class sensibilities...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jan 23, 2013

Miho Hazama starts a journey

It's believed that time spent living abroad can be a journey of self-discovery, and for Miho Hazama that has certainly been the case. Moving to New York to study for a master's degree in jazz composition at the Manhattan School of Music (MSM) was an experience that led to the recording of her debut,...
Japan Times
WORLD / Politics
Jan 21, 2013

Lincoln set the bar high for inaugural addresses

He first wrote out his speech in longhand. He had it printed and then cut the text into 27 snippets that he pasted on a sheet of paper. He changed three words and added 15 commas and semicolons.
JAPAN / Media
Jan 19, 2013

Oshima was in a realm of his own

Film director Nagisa Oshima passed away Tuesday. He was 80.
Japan Times
ASIA PACIFIC / WEEK 3
Jan 19, 2013

Nanjing remembers; disputes fester

Young Chinese marking the 75th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre are baptized in battles over war memory that shape bilateral relations.
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jan 19, 2013

Citizens' woeful social consciousness ensures a bleak outlook for Japan

What is behind the miserable social status of women in Japan?
Japan Times
CULTURE
Jan 17, 2013

Fujiwara chases a scoop in news-themed thriller

There aren't many celebrities who would make good journalists, but something tells me Norika Fujiwara is one. She's well-traveled, socially active and not constrained by the mechanisms of public-relations strategies.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 17, 2013

'Armadillo' / 'Cockfighter'

If you go to see "Armadillo", you will be in a cinema watching a war movie. A documentary, yes, but one that's safely on the screen as you sit back and watch Danish soldiers deployed in Afghanistan. You will watch those same soldiers try to relieve the boredom of life on a forward operating base by playing...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 17, 2013

Hakuin: The sight of one hand clapping

Most people know the famous riddle, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Many are also aware that it is connected with Zen Buddhism, and some will even know that it is a famous koan by the 18th-century monk Hakuin.
CULTURE / Film
Jan 17, 2013

Ian Buruma on 'Ai-no Borei (Empire of Passion)'

Nagisa Oshima is the best film director in Japan still making good movies. There are other good directors (Kon Ichikawa), but they are reduced to doing company hack-work. Oshima can still do the films he likes, partly because he gets financial backing in France from Argos Films, the producer of both...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Jan 12, 2013

My (attainable) New Year's resolutions: Giving up seiza

Having problems keeping your New Year's resolution? Not me. Because this year I chose resolutions that were easily fulfilled:
Reader Mail
Jan 10, 2013

Sexual privacy on/off the pitch

I do not accept that in the age of the Internet and social media privacy is an atavistic fantasy. Claims to the contrary are, politely speaking, stupid. Therefore, the loathsome things about New Zealand gay rights advocates calling on a suspected, anonymous homosexual member of the All Blacks rugby club...
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 9, 2013

India's rapid rise puts women at risk

For two decades, the West has been cheering India's rise. But the nation's economic and political changes have caused new cultural conflicts, a dynamic that has become all too obvious after the brutal, and eventually fatal, rape of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi last month.

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