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Japan Times
Features
Jul 13, 2008

Top creators call for museums to save nation's modern heritage

What do industrial design, architecture, manga, anime, video games and traditional craft techniques have in common? Well, apart from each having spawned some of Japan's most popular cultural exports, the similarity is this: Japan has no national museums dedicated to their preservation, display and study....
Japan Times
Features
Jul 13, 2008

Japan's culture policy lingers in limbo

It's a fact that has long puzzled devotees and plain old tourists alike. Japan's manga and anime arts have been wowing the world for more than a decade, and yet the national government still hasn't got around to setting up a proper museum for their enjoyment, preservation and study.
JAPAN / G8 COUNTDOWN
Jul 2, 2008

Talks may heat up and go nowhere but global warming isn't waiting

Eleven of the 12 years between 1995 and 2006 ranked among the 12 warmest years since 1850, and since 1993 the global sea level has risen by an annual rate of 3.1 mm.
CULTURE / Art / INSIDE ART
Jun 26, 2008

Few grab the reins that government set free

Rarely has a law with such potentially far-reaching consequences been greeted with such indifference and, apparently, had so little effect.
LIFE / Language
Jun 24, 2008

Building bridges across continents and cultures

Twelve Japanese elementary-school students gathered at Yoyogi Elementary School in central Tokyo on Saturday, May 10, to play games, cooperate with and learn a little about a similar group of students at an elementary school in Seoul, South Korea via Webcam on the Internet.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Jun 17, 2008

Lawmaker takes 9/11 doubts global

In a September 2003 article for The Guardian newspaper, Michael Meacher, who served as Tony Blair's environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003, shocked the establishment by calling the global war on terrorism "bogus." Even more controversially, he implied that the U.S. government either allowed...
CULTURE / Books
Jun 15, 2008

Stopping North Korea going nuclear

THE PENINSULA QUESTION: A Chronicle of the Second Korean Nuclear Crisis, by Yoichi Funabashi. Washington: Brookings Institution, 2007, 592 pp., $36.95 (cloth) NORTH KOREA ON THE BRINK: Struggle for Survival, by Glyn Ford with Soyoung Kwon. London: Pluto Press, 2008, 249 pp., £18.99 (cloth)
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 13, 2008

Losing Turkey to a new geopolitical course

OXFORD, England — Turkey has long been a haven of geopolitical stability. But since 2003, Turkey's virtually unquestioned alliance with the United States has undergone a profound re-evaluation due to the Iraq War. The Turkish consensus on its decades-long EU candidacy has begun to wobble, owing to...
JAPAN / TICAD IV
May 31, 2008

Making a continent 'vibrant'

YOKOHAMA — The defining phrase of this year's Tokyo International Conference on African Development was "Towards a Vibrant Africa." But what does this mean to the TICAD participants?
Japan Times
JAPAN / AFRICA LIFELINE
May 24, 2008

JICA, TICAD look beyond basics to growth

When the first Tokyo International Conference on African Development was held in 1993, aid to Africa still meant providing support for social infrastructure, including water, health and education projects, because many of the countries were in civil war and their people needed basic necessities.
Japan Times
JAPAN / AFRICA LIFELINE
May 23, 2008

Africa must lay foundation for investors: Sudan

As Japan increases efforts to promote sustainable growth, African countries must create an environment suitable for attracting private investment, says Steven Kiliona Wondu, Sudan's ambassador to Japan.
CULTURE / Books
May 18, 2008

'Woman Warrior' to 'Passport Baby'

LONDON, SPECIAL TO THE J (AP) Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts" opens: " 'You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you.' " LONDON — Since this fictional memoir was published in 1975, the telling of Chinese women's lives has become...
BUSINESS
May 17, 2008

SMBC logs 77.2% plunge in profit to ¥83 billion

Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Banking Inc. said Friday that net profit at its banking unit, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp., plunged 77.2 percent to ¥83 billion in the business year that ended in March as the U.S. subprime-loan upheaval eroded its profits.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
May 13, 2008

Team Japan faces huge hurdles on road to Homeless World Cup

Japan's collective image of homelessness is a fairly bleak one: Men in unwashed clothing, faces devoid of expression, hauling armfuls of flattened cardboard that will be their resting place for the night; rows of depressingly permanent-looking blue tarp huts in parks and beneath bridges, tucked out of...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
May 9, 2008

South Korean punk band Gumx regroups after military service

"Gumx is back!!" proclaimed the T-shirt for Seoul punk band Gumx's short Japan jaunt in late February. The band's first foreign gigs in more than three years, it had good reason to be excited about returning to the live circuit in its biggest market.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
May 4, 2008

Hideki Noda: Acting with joy in his soul

Even in today's theater world in Japan, which tends to venerate age, at just 52 Hideki Noda is already a towering, legendary figure.
Japan Times
BUSINESS
May 2, 2008

Real estate deflation looms

Akira Mori, Japan's richest man, spent a record ¥231 billion buying Tokyo's Toranomon Pastoral Hotel last September. He now says it's worth closer to ¥200 billion.
JAPAN
Apr 22, 2008

Moriya enters guilty plea

Former Vice Defense Minister Takemasa Moriya pleaded guilty Monday to charges of bribery and perjury and acknowledged taking part in bribes-for-contracts schemes with executives of defense equipment traders between 2003 and 2007.
BASEBALL / BASEBALL BULLET-IN
Apr 20, 2008

Uehara turns up pressure on self with MLB talk

Yomiuri Giants ace Koji Uehara may be putting too much pressure on himself after announcing on April 7 he will definitely exercise his right to free agency at the end of the current season and look to play in the major leagues in 2009.
EDITORIALS
Apr 20, 2008

Major ruling on SDF's Iraq mission

The Nagoya High Court Thursday ruled that the Air Self-Defense Force's mission in Iraq includes activities that violate the war-renouncing Constitution. It rejects the government's explanations concerning the dispatch of an ASDF unit to Iraq. Although the government says that the ruling does not bind...

Longform

Figure skater Akiko Suzuki was once told her ideal weight should be 47 kilograms, a number she now admits she “naively believed.” This led to her have a relationship with food that resulted in her suffering from anorexia.
The silent battle Japanese athletes fight with weight