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Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Aug 2, 2011

Disaster brings out best in people, communities

"The Towering Inferno." "Deep Impact." "The Road." Hollywood's notion of how communities react to a disaster is unequivocal: People panic, societies collapse and enemies take advantage of the chaos to settle old scores.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Aug 2, 2011

Drop a line, win a fix of '90s 'Alien Humor'

The newly released "Alien Humor" (Treasure Productions, 140 pages, soft cover, ¥1,400) is a collection of many of the pieces that Neil Garscadden wrote while editor of the humor section of The Alien magazine. Features that readers might remember include "Why It's Hard to Explain Life in Japan," "Inventions...
EDITORIALS
Jul 31, 2011

Rise in single-member households reflects concerns about income

For the first time, single people have become the largest category of household in Japan. A preliminary tabulation of last year's government census revealed June 29 that the number of single-member households exceeded 30 percent of the total 50.9 million households in the country.
CULTURE / Books
Jul 31, 2011

Tantalizingly tangled dead-man mystery

THE DEVOTION OF SUSPECT X, by Keigo Higashino. Translated by Alexander O. Smith. Minotaur Books, 2011, 304 pp., $24.99 (hardcover) A jogger discovers a male corpse wrapped in blue tarpaulin on the Tokyo embankment of the Edogawa. Someone has stripped the man's body, beaten his face until unrecognizable,...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jul 31, 2011

Timely film reiterates the 'no nukes' urgings of Barefoot Gen's creator

"Nothing has changed from the time of the atom bombs. ... It stands to reason that people are terrified of what they cannot see. I understand the hysteria. In the end, humans must not resort to the atom that they cannot control. The time has come for the Japanese people to make up their mind."
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Jul 26, 2011

Living and loving The Alien from Nagoya

The year 1990 might not seem so long ago, but for many reasons, and in Japan especially, it was a completely different world. There was no Internet. There were no mobile telephones. There was hardly any way to get up-to-date English information on places beyond Tokyo and Osaka except by going there....
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / How-tos / LIFELINES
Jul 26, 2011

Where there's the will for a will, there's a way

Lee would like to prepare a will in Japan and is not sure how to proceed:
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 25, 2011

Links between Pakistan and post-3/11 Japan

During my tenure there, Pakistan went through the heightening of tension resulting from the Islamist resistance to the U.S.-led military action in Afghanistan after September 11, 2001, and the near-war with India in May 2002.
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jul 24, 2011

What a difference a friend's tales of 'hair on the heart' can still make

"Shinzo ni Ke ga Haeteiru Wake" is the intriguing title of a book published in April by Kadokawa. The book was written by my good friend, Mari Yonehara, and its title in English would be "That's Why Hair Grows on the Heart."
CULTURE / Books
Jul 24, 2011

Unraveling the evolution of modern Japan

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF JAPANESE CULTURE AND SOCIETY. Edited by Victoria and Theodore Bestor with Akiko Yamagata. Routledge, 2011, 325 pp. (hardcover) This is a tremendous book and should jump the queue of all those books on contemporary Japan you have been intending to read. The editors deserve kudos...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Jul 23, 2011

Will supply meet mosquitoes' demand?

"Are there always this many mosquitoes?" says a tourist, slapping his bare legs with his hands as he comes down the stone staircase from the Shinto shrine behind my house. This ancient staircase that goes up the mountain and into the forest is a magnet for tourists. It's so mysterious, you just have...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 21, 2011

From the favelas of Brazil come street-style dancers supreme

In a weeklong festival of street-dance performances and competitions being held at Kanagawa Arts Theatre (KAAT) in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, starting from July 30, one dance group perhaps stands out in particular for its emotionally charged performances.
EDITORIALS
Jul 20, 2011

3/11 victims face welfare cuts

Cases have surfaced in which municipalities in Tohoku have stopped welfare payments to victims of the March 11 earthquake-tsunami and subsequent nuclear crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jul 17, 2011

It seems Japan has literally gone to the dogs

Japan has found an answer to loneliness, despair, fear, disgust and uncertainty. Hint: It's alive, stands on four legs and barks. Well, so much the better if the gloom weighing us down can be so easily dispelled. Or is it?
Japan Times
JAPAN / WEEK 3
Jul 17, 2011

Films focus on Japan's nuclear flashpoints

The crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11 has revealed the danger posed by the storing of spent nuclear fuel in pools at the plant, because after the pools drained partly or wholly the fuel heated up and discharged radiation.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jul 17, 2011

Oblivion is a soldier's reward

Shigeru Mizuki's "Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths" begins with a gallery of the faces of each of the 30 main characters.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 15, 2011

'Under the Hawthorn Tree'

One of my girlfriends in high school had super-strict parents. Not only was she required to be home by the ungodly hour of 8 p.m. every night, she was allowed no boys in her life, and her dad even forbade her to smile and say "thank you" to the delivery guy. On the other hand, this girl recognized the...
Japan Times
CULTURE
Jul 15, 2011

Will heartthrob Mukai shine as the shogun?

This year's NHK Sunday evening drama has already entered the history books for one, perhaps inauspicious, reason. On March 12, a day after the Great East Japan Earthquake, NHK announced that the following day's broadcast of "Go," as the show is titled, would be canceled to make way for news coverage....
JAPAN
Jul 12, 2011

Radiation, debris vex Tohoku's fishermen

Four months after the quake and tsunami hit communities along the Tohoku coastline, fishermen in Fukushima Prefecture and nearby areas still find themselves in uncharted waters as contamination of the sea remains a major obstacle to their business.
JAPAN
Jul 5, 2011

Ichihashi denies intent to kill Hawker

Tatsuya Ichihashi pleaded not guilty Monday to premeditated murder in the 2007 slaying of Briton Lindsay Ann Hawker, 22, although he admitted raping her and hiding her corpse on his apartment balcony.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jul 3, 2011

Japan needs to do more than simply 'cope' with stress

What's ailing us? The list is long. In a nutshell: stress. Sixty percent of Japan's work force suffers from it, according to the business magazine Weekly Toyo Keizai.
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jul 3, 2011

Murakami puts a bomb under his compatriots' atomic complacency

"The Japanese will someday outgrow their nuclear allergy." I've never forgotten futurologist and Cold War military strategist Herman Kahn saying this to me on his visit to Japan in 1969, when I was his guide and occasional interpreter.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Jul 2, 2011

Long and short of pet grooming

"Wow, what's that?" I asked Mrs. Amano. In her arms she was holding a furry thing with whiskers. I couldn't quite recognize the animal as it had tufts of hair sticking out all over it — like a hexagram with a cat face in the middle.
JAPAN
Jul 1, 2011

Cesium found in child urine tests

Small amounts of radioactive cesium were found in the urine of 10 children in the city of Fukushima, confirming their internal exposure to radiation, citizens' groups that carried out a survey said Thursday.

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