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COMMUNITY
Nov 11, 2001

Trepanners open their minds with a hole in the head

Amanda Feilding spent four years searching for a surgeon to perform the operation. Several agreed, then backed out at the last minute, fearing the consequences if anything went wrong.
COMMUNITY
Nov 11, 2001

The Feldenkrais Method: Not just going through the motions

Does licking an imaginary ice cream appeal to you? With a tongue that reaches your chest? How about pecking like a chicken? Or perhaps you'd enjoy turning your face to the right while looking toward the left?
CULTURE / Music / JAZZNICITY
Nov 11, 2001

Fusion is dead, long live fusion

Fusion is the style of jazz pioneered by Miles Davis in the 1960s, most famously with his album "Bitches' Brew," in which the power, decibels and feedback of Jimi Hendrix were fused with the searing, exploratory complexity of John Coltrane.
LIFE / Food & Drink / BEST BAR NONE
Nov 11, 2001

So a girl walks into this bar

You usually are taken to the best bars -- or you're told about them. You don't usually find one by walking down a random street -- especially a big street -- and lurching through the first open door you see.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Nov 11, 2001

You can be an artist if you've half a mind to

Kristin Newton changes lives. Messages of appreciation fill her inbox. "This is a turning point in our lives," reads one. "We are looking at things so differently now."
Japan Times
CULTURE / TV & Streaming / CHANNEL SURF
Nov 11, 2001

Taking things one moment at a time

Monday night, the Nippon TV documentary series "Super TV" (9 p.m.) chronicles the last six months of a man with terminal cancer. Last year, the show's producers received a letter from the man's children, who explained their father's situation and asked them "to record his life right up until the last...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Nov 11, 2001

Unlocking the 'qi'

Dressed in a white robe, a female qi master calmly stands in a room. Her face a mask of concentration, she puts her hands into a metal box. She quietly waits for three minutes. Then concentrates for seven minutes.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Nov 11, 2001

In praise of Japan's 'Greatest Generation'

Perhaps as a reaction against the excesses of an age of material prosperity and greed, America in recent years has seen a spate of books and movies extolling the so-called Greatest Generation, the quiet men who went off to fight in World War II. Similarly, Japan now has "Project X," a popular NHK-TV...
BUSINESS
Nov 11, 2001

Ban placed on U.S. chicken imports

Japan has suspended imports of chickens and ducks from the United States because of concern over the possible spread of a type of influenza virus affecting poultry, the agriculture ministry said.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Nov 11, 2001

Mixing it up in the States

THE SUM OF OUR PARTS: Mixed Heritage Asian Americans, edited by Teresa Williams-Leon and Cynthia L. Nakashima. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001, 296 pp., 22.95 (paper) High intermarriage rates, massive waves of immigration, and the easing of restrictions on global travel are blurring racial...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Nov 11, 2001

Trying to sell the news to kids who don't care

We've heard a lot lately about the decline of literacy in the developed world, as more people turn to new technology as their principal source of information. Commentators often illustrate this claim with figures demonstrating how no one reads novels anymore or by citing the decline in advertising revenue....
LIFE / Food & Drink / THE WAY OF WASHOKU
Nov 11, 2001

The days of eating dangerously

Whatever caused the first guy to figure out how to eat a blowfish and live — an attempt to impress a girl or perhaps a wealthy patron — we may never know, but we can be grateful that he did.
JAPAN
Nov 11, 2001

Officials ignore domestic violence: poll

Japanese women who have survived abuse at the hands of their husbands or boyfriends say police, government offices and people around them typically turn a blind eye to their suffering, according to a Cabinet Office survey.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Nov 11, 2001

Prodigies in a flash -- but maybe much too soon

"My daughter can solve algebraic differentiation and integration." "My son reads the Nikkei Shimbun every morning." "My child has read 'War and Peace.' "
LIFE / Food & Drink / NIHONSHU
Nov 11, 2001

How mold grew to be so unique

There are two things that make nihonshu unique among the world's alcoholic beverages. One is the process known as heiko fukuhakko, or multiple parallel fermentation. In short, this means that saccharification and fermentation take place simultaneously in the same vat, as opposed to sequentially, as in...
BUSINESS
Nov 10, 2001

U.S. Chamber of Commerce urges reforms push

The U.S. business community is urging Japan to pursue reforms that will help the economy and attract more American investment, the visiting chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said Friday.
JAPAN
Nov 10, 2001

Survey details male, female eating habits

Around 50 percent of men in their 20s through their 40s have at least one enjoyable meal in the company of other people every day, according to a national nutrition report released Thursday by the health ministry.
JAPAN
Nov 10, 2001

MSDF heads for Indian Ocean

Two Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyers and a supply ship left Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, on Friday for a two-month intelligence-gathering mission in the Indian Ocean as part of Japan's noncombat support of the U.S.-led attacks on Afghanistan.
COMMENTARY
Nov 10, 2001

At last, Mori solution gets reconsidered

The events of Sept. 11 have at least done some good. To bolster its war on "terrorism," the United States seems willing finally to put an end to its highly contrived legacy of Cold War, anti-Beijing policies. Meanwhile, Japan may be ready to end its highly contrived, 50-year Cold War dispute with Moscow...
JAPAN
Nov 10, 2001

Japan pledges $600,000 to UNESCO work

Japan will donate $623,798 to the first phase of UNESCO's Longmen grottoes conservation project to help preserve sculptures carved in cave walls over a millennium ago in China, the Foreign Ministry said Friday.
JAPAN
Nov 10, 2001

School trips to Okinawa to be subsidized

The government plans to provide about 50 million yen in subsidies for school excursion programs to Okinawa, which has seen a sharp fall in tourism since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, government officials said.
COMMUNITY
Nov 10, 2001

Welsh Society to sing its heart out for seeing dogs

Think Welsh and imagine small, dark, tough people with a passion for rugby and choral singing, the red dragon of the national flag, sunny daffodils (the national flower) and the green valleys of southern Wales. Yet here is Ursula Bartlett Imadegawa (known to friends as Ursula Bi) -- a blonde with green...
COMMENTARY
Nov 10, 2001

Brace yourself for the new McCarthyism

NEW YORK -- According to The Wall Street Journal I'm "probably the most bitterly anti-American commentator in America." The National Review calls me "a big fat zero, an ignorant, talentless hack with a flair for recycling leftist pieties into snarky cartoons that inspired breakfast-table chuckles among...
JAPAN
Nov 10, 2001

GDP set to contract 0.9% in '01: Cabinet

The Cabinet Office on Friday reversed its economic projection for fiscal 2001 from growth of 1.7 percent to a 0.9 percent contraction in real gross domestic product, marking the bleakest outlook in the postwar period and the first forecasted shrinkage since 1998.
JAPAN
Nov 10, 2001

NPA outlines gun-firing policy

The National Police Agency notified prefectural police forces nationwide Friday of new guidelines regarding the use of firearms, clarifying the circumstances in which officers may be allowed to fire their revolvers.
BUSINESS
Nov 10, 2001

Business confidence plummets

Business confidence worsened in the July-September quarter to a three-year low amid increasing worries about the slowdown in the global economy, according to survey results released Friday by the government Friday.
COMMENTARY
Nov 10, 2001

Pakistan's uncertain future

NEW DELHI -- Much before America's declaration of war on terrorism forced Islamabad to turn against its own creation, the Taliban, Pakistan faced an uncertain future. During a four-hour stop in Islamabad in March 2000, U.S. President Bill Clinton warned Pakistanis in a televised address about the "obstacles...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Nov 10, 2001

Exotic Japan found in mundane things

I had just purchased a sweat shirt at the Gap, picked up some shampoo at the Body Shop and ordered pizza from Pizza Hut when I received an e-mail saying: "You live in Japan? How exotic!"

Longform

In 2020, 38% of all households were single-person. That figure is projected to rise to 44.3% by 2050.
The rise of AI companionship in a lonely Japan