Search - life

 
 
LIFE / Lifestyle / ON THE BOOK TRAIL
Sep 23, 2008

'The Prison Runner,' 'The Charlie and Lola Series'

"The Prison Runner," Deborah Ellis, OUP; 2008; 190 pp. A wobbly tooth, a favorite library book that has been lent out to someone else — these are the sorts of problems that children should be growing up with. But life isn't the same everywhere, and in developing countries such as Bolivia, children...
Reader Mail
Sep 21, 2008

No substitute for Japanese rice

Since moving here to the other side of the planet, I have never ceased wondering what it would be like to live in any number of other places in the world, because it's fascinating that human beings live everywhere. I am entertained by the notion that every little village I can find in my atlas supports...
CULTURE / Books
Sep 21, 2008

From Murakami's memoir to your own diary

WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel, London: Harvill Secker, 2008, 192 pp., £9.99 (cloth) MURAKAMI DIARY by Haruki Murakami, London: Vintage, 2008, 176 pp., £9.99 (paper)
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 19, 2008

'Kodomo no Kodomo'

Teenage pregnancy has always been with us, but attitudes toward it have changed. A generation ago, the situation of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's daughter — 17, pregnant and unwed — would have inspired conservative tut-tutting. Now it's a cause of conservative celebration.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 18, 2008

Digital, rough and maybe deadly

Zaim is dirty. The floor is scuffed, the windows old, the building a strange maze of rooms with low ceilings. Compared to the slick show on a couple blocks away at this year's Yokohama Triennale, the exhibition space that used to be a government office building is beat-up and ready for trouble.
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / IGADGET
Sep 17, 2008

Casio entries put on a cute face

Baby faces: Toughness and cute fashion cachet appear to be mutually exclusive concepts. Casio begs to differ with its latest incarnation of Baby-G watches, the petite sibling of its popular G-Shock tough guys of timepieces. The 14 new models are coming out in four different series: the all-digital BG810...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 12, 2008

'Paco to Maho no Ehon'

Tetsuya Nakashima is being hailed as a genius by the Japanese film world, an epithet that didn't occur to many in the 1990s when his pitch-black comedies, including "Natsu Jikan no Otonatachi (Happy-Go-Lucky)" (1997) and "Beautiful Sunday" (1998), were playing to tiny audiences here and getting little...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 11, 2008

Annette Messager: one humble messenger

Around the 1960s, French artist Annette Messager began to move away from the idea of "great art." Using materials readily available around the house, her works acquired an air of familiarity and allowed her to use these often effeminated — and thus undervalued — materials to make social critiques....
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / JAPAN TIMES BLOGROLL
Sep 10, 2008

NihonHacks.com

Japan is not the cheapest place to live, and it can be frustratingly confusing, even for long-timers. Fortunately, there is NihonHacks.com, the blog devoted to tips for stretching your yen and saving time, courtesy of American-born, Japan-based blogger Thomas Hjelm (with some input from his wife and...
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 9, 2008

Nepal's remarkable do-it-yourself peace

KATMANDU — Nepali Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal, known as "Prachanda," has now been sworn in as the first prime minister of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, having won an overwhelming vote in the Constituent Assembly elected in April.
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Sep 9, 2008

The withered middle-aged guy becomes a hot item in Japan's dating market

If you happen to be an over-45 male, looking a little tired, inclined to decline party invitations because you can't stand the hassle, comfortable in your own company and not really caring what other people think — so, the news is ALL good, at least in urban Japan. You are, or are extremely close...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 5, 2008

'Into the Wild'

We've all felt the urge to get away from it all, but few of us would take it to the extremes that Chris McCandless did.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 5, 2008

'The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler'

Since "The Downfall" (2004), stories about Hitler or German life under the Third Reich have been rapidly emerging from Germany created by a new generation of directors born long after World War II. "Sophie Scholl: The Final Days" from 2005 is the standout, a heavily introspective work about a girl who...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 5, 2008

MY PLAYLIST: James Smith, Hadouken!

British band Hadouken! are a curious construction. If you left them out in a storm to be struck by lightning and broken into their constituent parts, in among the blood and guts would flow a river of toxic neon goo, melting cyberpunk sartorials and a sprinkling of electrochip innards.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 4, 2008

Veiled sexuality meshes with Muslim values

NEW YORK — A woman swathed in black to her ankles, wearing a head scarf or a full chador, walks down a European or North American street, surrounded by other women in halter tops, miniskirts and short shorts. She passes under immense billboards on which other women swoon in sexual ecstasy, cavort in...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 4, 2008

Devo uphold their duty now for the future

As I sit down opposite the gray-haired man in a black shirt and glasses, someone comes to clear the clutter off the table — a stick-thin, retro-futuristic guitar that has been rigged for its strings to explode at the climax of a solo. His flame-haired partner takes a seat; he's wearing a full suit...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Sep 2, 2008

Urawaza — quirky, everyday Japanese tips — head West

Two years ago, a mysterious 20-second video clip triggered some unexpected buzz on the Web site YouTube. In the segment, an ordinary-looking housewife draws an invisible line across the chest of a shirt with her finger. Then she pinches the shirt under the armpit and at the shoulder, does a quick flipping...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / FREEWHEELIN' ACROSS JAPAN
Aug 29, 2008

The naked and the (almost) dead

The feast of fish being delivered to our table is fit for the Emperor, as is the price of the room I'm eating it in at Inubosaki Kanko hotel in Choshi, a small seaside town in northeastern Chiba Prefecture. But I'm not complaining about forking out ¥36,000 for one night as it's the biggest and best...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Aug 28, 2008

Ainu musician Oki brings the world to Hokkaido

With a Japanese mother and Ainu father, the appearance of Oki on "The Rough Guide to the Music of Japan" with his Oki Dub Ainu Band presents a rare glimpse of the multiracial underbelly that Japan seems reluctant to own up to. Despite being indigenous to Hokkaido, or Ezo as it is known to them, the Ainu...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WORDS TO LIVE BY
Aug 26, 2008

Dewi Sukarno

Dewi Sukarno, nee Naoko Nemoto, 68, is the widow of Indonesia's first president, Sukarno. When she married him in 1959, the then 19-year-old Japanese beauty was no accidental Cinderella: From age 5, she had meticulously prepared herself for a leading role in history. Much like Hideyoshi Toyotomi, the...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Aug 24, 2008

'Nation of copycats' maligns Japan's fine science and technology

One of the most commonly discussed issues of national character in Japan revolves around the question of personal creativity. Put simply, it is this: Are the Japanese lacking in the DNA of originality?
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Aug 23, 2008

Risk-averse telecoms stifling innovation: Natsuno

One of Japan's top cell phone innovators says that for all his country's technological prowess, it could never have produced the iPhone.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 19, 2008

The hidden costs of thinking about money

PRINCETON, N.J. — When people say "Money is the root of all evil," they usually don't mean that money itself is the root of evil. Like St. Paul of the New Testament, from whom the quote comes, they have in mind the love of money. Could money itself, whether we are greedy for it or not, be a problem?...
LIFE / Language / KANJI CLINIC
Aug 19, 2008

Cache of weapons concealed in kanji

By 200 A.D., Chinese scholars had already created the 50,000-kanji prototype for the modern written languages of China and Japan. Many Sino-Japanese characters still in use today feature components picturing objects from everyday life in ancient China, including weapons for battling other humans or confronting...
CULTURE / Books
Aug 17, 2008

Avoiding flat tires

JAPAN: 6,000 Miles on a Bicycle, by Leigh Norrie. Printed Matter Press, 2008, 229 pp., ¥2,000 (paper) The worst account of a bicycle trip ever written about must surely be Bernard Magnouloux's "Travels with Rosinante," a five-year, 199-puncture journey around the world, in which the author struggled...
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
Aug 17, 2008

Death is big business in Japan

Like it or not, we will all die one day.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 15, 2008

'Sex and the City'

Hmmm. This is tough. Trashing "Sex and the City" is like saying you don't own one pair of great strap-on heels or a little black dress. It's like admitting to years of celibacy. Immediately, you're seen as less than a woman (the modern definition of one anyway), one with no sense, no taste, weird and...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WORDS TO LIVE BY
Aug 12, 2008

"Harry Potter" translator Yuko Matsuoka Harris

Yuko Matsuoka Harris, age 64, is the translator of the "Harry Potter" books in Japan and the president of the series' Japanese publisher, Say-zan-sha. Similar to the series' Hermione, Matsuoka has always been exceptional: As one of the best simultaneous interpreters in Japan, during her 30-year career...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Aug 12, 2008

Custody battles: an unfair fight

"Sport at its best obliterates divisions between peoples, such as ostentatious flag-waving and exaggerated national sentiment." New York Times senior writer Howard W. French — who has covered China for the past five years, was Tokyo bureau chief from 1999 to 2003, and has lived overseas for all but...

Longform

An illustration features the Japanese signs for "ganbare" (good luck) and the Deaflympics, which will be held between Nov. 15 and 26.
A century of Deaf sport finds its moment in Tokyo