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COMMENTARY / World
Dec 8, 2002

Fellow Tibetans threatening Dalai Lama

MADRAS, India -- Buddha taught peace to mankind, but his followers in India appear to have embarked on a path of violence. In the northern Indian town of Dharamshala, the headquarters of the Tibetan government in exile, posters now threaten to kill the Dalai Lama.
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 8, 2002

Myanmar's generals allergic to dialogue

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and many world leaders have welcomed the recent release of 115 political prisoners from various prisons in Myanmar. At the same time, many leaders have voiced concerns about the more than 1,000 remaining political prisoners, human rights abuses and the lack...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Dec 8, 2002

Cashing in far away

Akihisa Fujita has always been a night owl. The 32-year-old former bartender spent much of his 20s serving drinks at high-end establishments in Tokyo's Ginza and Yoyogi-Uehara districts, all the while dreaming of owning his own.
CULTURE / TV & Streaming / CHANNEL SURF
Dec 8, 2002

Soaring lineup to peak your curiosity as well as appetite

On Monday at 8 p.m., TV Asahi presents the fourth special in its ongoing documentary series about the history of human endeavor with "The Legend of Human Flight."
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Dec 8, 2002

On the night side of life

The last trains have long gone and the stations are shuttered.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Dec 8, 2002

There's cows in them there hills

Even today, most of the "milk" in Japan is soymilk, eaten as tofu. The lactic sort, from cows, may be steadily growing in popularity, but consumption per person is still only around a liter a week, according to government data issued last year.
EDITORIALS
Dec 8, 2002

Blue as a rose

'I 've never seen a purple cow/I never hope to see one/But I can tell you anyhow/I'd rather see than be one," wrote the American humorist Gelett Burgess more than 100 years ago. Burgess is a man whose views we ought to pay more attention to. After all, he also supposedly invented the "blurb," by writing...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / NATURE TRAVEL
Dec 8, 2002

Swiftlets threatened by bowls of soup

Entering a Borneo emporium in 1922, American missionary Elizabeth Mershon noted that "many strange and evil-smelling articles greet the eye and the nose."
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Dec 8, 2002

Expat writers shoot from the lip

FACES IN THE CROWDS: A Tokyo International Anthology, edited by Hillel Wright. Printed Matter Press: Tokyo, 2002, 254 pp., 2 yen,500/$25 (cloth) "Faces in the Crowds" is a hyperkinetic grab bag that brings work by a cross section of Tokyo's expat writers, and Japanese writers working in English, together...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Dec 8, 2002

Capital transports of restricted delight

It's got the party places. It's got the party people. Now if only someone could come up with a way to get the people to the places, Tokyo could truly call itself a 24-hour city.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Dec 8, 2002

Brief encounters in the darkness

It stirs to life when the high-rise office lights click off floor by floor, when bleary-eyed men in suits drift away to their homes in the suburbs and beyond. It simmers with activity even as the most garrulous crows snooze beneath the stars.
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Dec 8, 2002

It can be a royal pain to be in the family

Bowing to the media's ongoing obsession with the returned abductees, the first birthday of Princess Aiko passed with little more than token coverage.
MORE SPORTS
Dec 7, 2002

Yawara-chan, Tani to tie the knot

Judoka Ryoko Tamura is set to announce her engagement to baseball player Yoshitomo Tani of the Orix BlueWave, sources close to the Olympic and world champion said Friday.
EDITORIALS
Dec 7, 2002

Controversial Aegis dispatch

Whether or not to send an Aegis destroyer to the Indian Ocean has been a touchy question ever since Japan indirectly joined in the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan about a year ago. The question was settled, officially at least, earlier this week when the government decided, after hemming and hawing,...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Dec 7, 2002

Journeying back to tribal roots with eagle feather

Two years ago, after more than a decade in Japan, Shirley (Blackstar) Macdonald and her husband, Chris, decided it was time to go home. Now they run Eagle Feather Gallery in Victoria, British Columbia, with a magnificent cedar house in deep forest north of the city. A long way from working in Tokyo,...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Dec 7, 2002

Japan: Where every day is a diet date

It's the holiday season and on my planet, the United States, that means people are preoccupied with how to stay slim during this season of indulgence. Magazines typically feature articles on how to burn calories by doing ordinary things -- such as walking to the mailbox instead of driving, or by choosing...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM MOSCOW
Dec 7, 2002

NATO's Balkanization begins

MOSCOW -- The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established after World War II to protect Western Europe from a possible Soviet invasion. Once the Soviet empire crumbled, it was left without a purpose. In the euphoria of 1989-1991, it seemed that democracy and humanism had triumphed throughout Europe,...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Dec 7, 2002

Mitsunori Seino

A European missionary who many years ago established a school in the hill station of Darjeeling said every person has two basic requirements in life: cleanliness and books.
SOCCER / PREMIER REPORT
Dec 6, 2002

Newcastle's Robson set for dramatic return to Nou Camp

LONDON -- Dreams, apparently, do come true.
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 6, 2002

Blocs should transcend members' shortcomings

CHIANG MAI, Thailand -- As long as regional cooperation develops in various parts of the world, it is only natural that some concerns are voiced from time to time, especially about the composition of these groupings.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / THE WAY OF WASHOKU
Dec 6, 2002

Rice vinegar is key to the pause that refreshes

I must admit I have never been a huge fan of televised sports. Most holidays, growing up in the eastern United States, I was in the kitchen, either cooking or dispensing advice on food and otherwise.
BASEBALL / MLB
Dec 6, 2002

Matsui happy to hear Red Sox interested in his services

Free agent slugger Hideki Matsui said on Wednesday he is thankful for the interest the Boston Red Sox are showing in acquiring him for next season.
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 6, 2002

Refer grim 'futurologists' to Adam Smith

GUATEMALA CITY -- It is both telling and disturbing that so many of those wishing to be regarded as "futurologists" seem to prefer Thomas Malthus to Adam Smith. For his part, much of Malthus' work was premised upon a view that world conditions are essentially static.
ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK
Dec 5, 2002

Carping over muddy ponds

Me and Mr. Matsuki, we're developers. There -- I've said it. We actually alter habitat. We haven't got around to making golf courses yet, but about 10 years ago, when I bought another section of land to add to what is now the Nagano prefectural Afan Woodland Trust, there was a large section of it that...
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Dec 5, 2002

GM crops get good press? Surely not

Everyone from religious scholars to British lords seems to have an opinion on genetically modified foods -- whether it is that they are "Frankensteinian" or that they are creations revealing the promise of biotechnology in the service of humanity.
LIFE / Digital
Dec 5, 2002

Digital cameras get pocket-sized right

Those who bought their first digital camera several years ago spent upwards of 100,000 yen on bulky hunks that shot mediocre photos at best.
SOCCER / World cup
Dec 4, 2002

Ronaldo rises again

YOKOHAMA -- In case there was ever any doubt that it is the best team in the world, Real Madrid made it official on Tuesday night in Yokohama, beating South American champion Olimpia of Paraguay 2-0 to capture the Toyota Cup in front of a crowd of 66,070.
EDITORIALS
Dec 4, 2002

IOC stumbles but moves forward

The International Olympic Committee, at a general meeting in Mexico last week, discussed a proposal to drop three sports -- baseball, softball and the modern pentathlon -- from the 2008 Beijing Games, but in the end decided to postpone a decision until after the 2004 Games take place in Athens. IOC members...
COMMENTARY
Dec 4, 2002

The high price of Saudi oil

WASHINGTON -- The U.S.-Saudi relationship is again engulfed in controversy. Did a Saudi princess, and wife of the Saudi ambassador to the United States, give money to two of the 9/11 hijackers? Yet again, both governments are paying a high price for their unnatural friendship.

Longform

Koichi Tagawa’s diary entry from Aug. 9, 1945, describes the day of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
The horrors of Nagasaki, in first person