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COMMENTARY / World
Dec 13, 2012

Should we strive to live to age 1,000?

On which problems should we focus research in medicine and the biological sciences? There is a strong argument for tackling the diseases that kill the most people — diseases like malaria, measles and diarrhea, which kill millions in developing countries, but very few in the developed world.
CULTURE / Books
Dec 9, 2012

Globe-trotting acrobat left a mark on Japan

PROFESSOR RISLEY AND THE IMPERIAL JAPANESE TROUPE: How an American Acrobat Introduced Circus to Japan — and Japan to the West, by Frederik L. Schodt. Stone Bridge Press, 2012, 336 pp., $35 (hardcover) When a storyteller wields a scholar's pen, history truly comes alive. When that history crosses the...
Japan Times
BASEBALL / MLB
Dec 9, 2012

Granderson sharing passion for baseball on tour of Asia

Curtis Granderson doesn't have to be here. He's got money; he's got fame; he's been an MLB All-Star three times; and, well, he's a New York Yankee.
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 4, 2012

Sacred India's Chinese flavor

More than a billion small lamps lit the evening sky and hand-held sparkler fireworks added to the dancing light, while firecrackers boomed almost as if a war was going on. In hundreds of millions of homes, people chanted the sacred mantras and called upon the gods to help good defeat evil, and light...
MORE SPORTS
Nov 25, 2012

Hanyu, Mao victorious in NHK Trophy

Yuzuru Hanyu gave the hometown fans what they wanted most on Saturday — a victory by their hero at the NHK Trophy.
BASEBALL
Nov 25, 2012

Samurai Japan fans will miss nation's MLB players in upcoming WBC

They are dropping like flies. Talking here about Japanese players in the major leagues who have decided they will not play in the World Baseball Classic in March. Yu Darvish, Hisashi Iwakuma, Norichika Aoki, Ichiro Suzuki and Hiroki Kuroda, members of their country's championship teams in 2006 and 2009,...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Nov 18, 2012

Japan's Ogasawara Islands: one year after UNESCO

Leaning over the railing on the top deck of a five-story ferry, I watch the southern most tips of the two peninsulas that border Tokyo Bay fade into the distance of the gray-blue sea. The gargantuan vessel rocks gently beneath my feet, the steady ocean breeze a comfort on my skin I had almost forgotten...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Nov 9, 2012

Jazzing up the industrial city

On one side you have Montreux, a Swiss resort town on the banks of Lake Geneva that has seen many famous residents over the years, and which has been immortalized in the lyrics of the Deep Purple song "Smoke On The Water." On the other you have a Japanese city in the heart of the world's most heavily...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Oct 13, 2012

Manga artist wields 'fude' brush in samurai epic

Illustrator and comic book artist Mulele Jarvis came to Tokyo just as he reached adulthood. It was five years after he had first discovered manga near his home in San Francisco, at Kinokuniya Bookstore, next door to Japantown: "That's where I found Katsuhiro Otomo's 'Akira.' I was so impressed by it,...
Japan Times
JAPAN / IMF-WORLD BANK IN TOKYO
Oct 12, 2012

A pair in dire need of a reality check

Japan is hosting an annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank for the first time since 1964. A lot has happened in the intervening very nearly half a century — to both Japan and the IMF. Yet both Japan and the IMF do not quite seem to realize just how much has happened to...
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 24, 2012

Secret of success for the top-rated universities

No country dominates any industry as much as the United States dominates higher education. According to Shanghai Jiao-Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities, for example, 17 of the world's 20 best universities are American, with Harvard topping the list by a substantial margin.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 21, 2012

'The Hunger Games'

In 2000, filmmaker Kinji Fukasaku came out with his adaptation of the novel "Battle Royale," a dystopian fable set in a near-future totalitarian Japan where a law called "BR" has been established to keep ninth-graders under strict control in a world of torturous fear and brutal murder. Twelve years later,...
SOCCER / PREMIER REPORT
Sep 7, 2012

Motivation needed for Moldova match

Roy Hodgson's main concern as England begins its qualification program for the 2014 World Cup finals on Friday is that Moldova will be seen as a walkover.
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Sep 3, 2012

Imagine a better Olympics for Japan

"Sekai wa itsuka hitotsu ni naru" (「世界はいつかひとつになる」) — that's what "And the world will be as one," from John Lennon's "Imagine," sounds like in Japanese, at least according to the Asahi Shimbun. The matter arises in connection with the dai sanjukkai orinpikku kyogitaikai (第三十回オリンピック競技大会,...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Sep 2, 2012

Film star Satoshi Tsumabuki moves up to a new stage

Wearing a headband and tracksuit, Satoshi Tsumabuki — the 31-year-old darling of the Japanese entertainment world — was easy to spot among a crowd of actors in a rehearsal studio in downtown Tokyo recently. He was there preparing for "Egg," Hideki Noda's new play, which opens Wednesday at the Tokyo...
EDITORIALS
Sep 2, 2012

Troubling rise in small arms trade

T he international trade in small arms more than doubled since 2006, growing into a stunning $8.5 billion a year industry. The latest Small Arms Survey by an independent research group in Geneva found that large-scale government spending and increased purchases by American civilians, in addition to steady...
Japan Times
SPORTS / ODDS AND EVENS
Aug 19, 2012

Taking a look back at the spectacular London Games

Before boarding the plane on Wednesday to return to Japan, here are items I scribbled down on paper from the Olympics extravaganza of the past few weeks, days that will always remain in my memory.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 15, 2012

Iran is not the cause of Syria's worsening crisis

We humans often make the mistake of not learning from history, even when it is recent. Civil war in the Levant is not a thing of the distant past. With Syria descending into worsening violence, the 15-year Lebanese civil war should provide frightening lessons of what happens when the fabric of a society...
Japan Times
LIFE
Aug 12, 2012

Queen Elizabeth engineering prize seeks innovation for easing life's hardships

Nominations are currently open for Britain's first-ever international Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, which has been created to honor individuals for groundbreaking innovation that benefits humanity — and which rewards the winner handsomely with a staggering £1 million (¥123 million).
EDITORIALS
Aug 12, 2012

Happy 50th, Beatles!

Imagine there's no Beatles. It's impossible, even if you try. Their music is too well known and too deeply loved. When Paul McCartney sang "Hey Jude" at the opening of the London Olympics two weeks ago, people around the world sang along — they all knew the melody and the words. What other band in...
OLYMPICS
Aug 2, 2012

Table tennis back home in Britain

It's commonly known that the British gave the world rugby and cricket and soccer (though football is the precise term used by the proud English and most of the civilized world).
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 23, 2012

Dreams of isolation imperil island populations

The Japanese and the British may seem very different, but a closer look reveals something akin to a parallel destiny for these two island peoples.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Jul 15, 2012

Slugs, snails and astonishing tales

Late last month, I arrived at my friends' house in the historic southwest English town of Stroud a little too early, only to find both Ian and Caroline Redmond out. So, with time on my hands, I wandered into their lovely garden on the slope of a hill overlooking the town and began to "potter about."...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jun 22, 2012

Politics is inescapable at 'Arab Express' exhibition

The Arab Spring may not be all it's cracked up to be. There are clearly problems with a large swath of nations, formerly under various forms of authoritarian regimes, switching relatively quickly to "democracy," at least as it is understood in the West.
EDITORIALS
Jun 10, 2012

Reaching for the sky

Japanese set three new records last month, all of them sky high. One was a marvel of technology, the other two marvels of human endurance. The achievements offer a renewed sense of hopefulness that Japan is still very much a can-do society.
Japan Times
BUSINESS
May 20, 2012

Economic woes, political volatility may creep into U.S. foreign affairs

No matter who wins the presidential election in November, the United States appears headed for a prolonged period of political volatility as leaders do not seem to have good answers to voters' anxieties about their economic future. This threatens to spill over into U.S. relations with the rest of the...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Apr 22, 2012

The weeklies need to expand their worldview

Japan cuts the world down to size. Thumb through the popular weekly news magazines to get the idea. The weeklies pride themselves on broader, bolder, feistier coverage than the daily press typically musters. All the same, theirs is a small, shrunken world. It consists of four countries: Japan, the United...

Longform

After pandemic-era border regulations eased, Indian migrants began returning to Japan. Their population now stands at more than 50,000 across the country.
How remote work is rewriting the migrant experience in Japan