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CULTURE / Books
Oct 17, 2000

A celebration of interracial marriages

GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER?, by Brenda Lane Richardson. Wildcat Canyon Press/Circulus Publishing Group, Inc., 2000, Berkeley, Calif., $14.95. Brenda Richardson is an award-winning African-American writer and partner in a 16-year marriage to a Swedish-American Episcopalian priest. She set out nearly...
CULTURE / Music
Oct 17, 2000

Badly drawn but beautifully sketched

Until I saw Damon Gough, the singer-songwriter better known as Badly Drawn Boy, in concert, it never occurred to me that the audience might be there for the performer's amusement rather than the other way around. At one point, Gough started handing out roses to women in the front row while he serenaded...
JAPAN
Oct 16, 2000

12 injured in firework explosion at Okayama shrine

OKAYAMA - Twelve people were injured Sunday when a firework rocket exploded near the ground during a festival at a shrine in Okayama Prefecture, police said.
JAPAN
Oct 16, 2000

Rail firms to beef up mobile-phone ban

A Tokyo subway operator and six major private railway firms plan to launch a joint campaign today to stress their ban on mobile-phone use in trains during rush hour, due to the danger of interference with pacemakers, the companies announced Sunday.
JAPAN
Oct 16, 2000

Japan eyes wider role in war games

Japan will try to persuade its allies to let it participate more in multilateral military drills in the Asia-Pacific region despite the limitations imposed on its forces by the Constitution, Defense Agency sources said Sunday.
COMMENTARY
Oct 16, 2000

Reorganization isn't reform

Japan's central bureaucracy will be reorganized, effective Jan. 6, to mark the start of a new administrative system. The reform will have significant influence on local governments and the public, too. It is part of efforts to restructure Japanese society, which has been bound by webs of restrictions...
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 16, 2000

Globalization proves a taxing issue

Listening to the bureaucrats at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and in other transnational organizations like the European Union, it appears that the most pressing issues about globalization is the impact upon governments' ability to collect taxes. Of course, these international...
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 16, 2000

The Net surviving in China

CAMBRIDGE, England -- China is in the process of establishing the rule of law. Not common law as in England or civil law as in most other countries, but socialist law. The basic difference between socialist law and other forms of law, it seems from recent practice, is that only the Chinese Communist...
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 16, 2000

South Korea grapples with rapprochement

SEOUL -- Some days ago I received an e-mail from a friend I hadn't heard from for a while, who teaches North Korean affairs at one of the major universities in Seoul. "I am worried," he wrote. "This is not a good time for South Korean scholars dealing with North Korea to express their views freely."...
COMMUNITY
Oct 16, 2000

Tasty seeds have hidden health benefits

Sprinkled on hamburger buns, bagels and cooked vegetables, sesame seeds add extra zest with their nutty flavor. Recent research has found, however, that there is much more to the humble sesame seed than just its good taste.
EDITORIALS
Oct 15, 2000

Turning the clock back

The Middle East continues its descent into violence. The immediate task is ending the bloodshed that has occurred throughout Palestinian territory and restoring order. The question hovering over the carnage is whether the peace process can be resurrected. Nearly 100 people have been killed in a little...
JAPAN
Oct 15, 2000

BOJ tour aims to educate the public

KOBE -- Some words of advice for those who dream of laying their hands on 100 million yen -- don't spend money on lottery tickets, just join a tour organized by the Bank of Japan's Kobe branch.
BASEBALL / BASEBALL BULLET-IN
Oct 15, 2000

Former Carp farmhand making impact with Mets

It's always nice to see a player from Japan make it in the major leagues, whether it be a Japanese pitcher such as Hideo Nomo or Kazuhiro Sasaki, or a foreigner such as Matt Stairs, Rob Ducey or Lee Stevens getting another shot at the Bigs after spending time in the Central or Pacific Leagues in Dai...
CULTURE / Books / POETRY MIGNETTE
Oct 15, 2000

Rexroth revolution comes home to Japan

Yokohama-based essayist and poet Morgan Gibson has been and continues to be one of the most prolific contributors to Japan's English literary scene. Of his own work he had poems published in the 1970s in pioneering journals like One Mind and Kyoto Review and later, in the '80s, in publications like Blue...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Oct 15, 2000

Ercilia Chiaradia

Ercilia Chiaradia says she could talk forever about Argentina. The wife of the Argentine ambassador to Japan comes from Buenos Aires, capital city that opens out upon one of the largest ports in the world. City born and bred, Ercilia has a wide background in Argentina, the wedge-shaped country that occupies...
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 15, 2000

India shooting itself in the foot

During a recent trip to India, the heretical thought took hold that ardent nationalists can be de facto anti-nationals.
MORE SPORTS
Oct 15, 2000

Lapentti, Schalken book spots in Japan Open tennis final

With the top three seeds out of contention, it was left to the fourth seed, Ecuador's Nicolas Lapentti, to lead the way into the final of the Japan Open tennis tournament on Saturday, and the world No. 16 duly obliged with a clinical 6-3, 6-4 victory over Slovakia's Dominik Hrbaty.
COMMUNITY
Oct 15, 2000

Honesty is JAL president's policy

Entranced by the view from the windows of an executive meeting room on the 24th floor of the headquarters of Japan Airlines in Tokyo's Tennozu Isle, I almost missed the entrance of JAL's president, Isao Kaneko. Luckily he is not the kind of man to take offense. Slightly built, in a pale gray suit, he...
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 15, 2000

Where do the Japanese stand today?

A malaise is abroad in Japan and that malaise is apathy and hopelessness. Ever since the Meiji era -- 1868-1912 -- when the modern state of Japan was established and developed, the one thing that the Japanese people imbued their national effort, their prodigious diligence, with was a sense of hope: that...
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 15, 2000

Raising Japan's children the right way

The birth and development of a child is the product of genetic and parental, natal, familial and sociocultural factors.
BASEBALL / MLB
Oct 15, 2000

Hawks pitcher Fujii passes away at 31

Daiei Hawks pitcher Masao Fujii died at a Fukuoka hospital Friday. He was 31, three days short of his 32nd birthday. Fujii had been hospitalized at the National Kyushu Medical Center for interstitial pneumonia.
COMMUNITY
Oct 15, 2000

Here she is . . . Miss Stereotype

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Miss America Pageant may aim to represent the ideal of U.S. womanhood, but it's got its problems; it's about as internally conflicted as Al Gore trying to act like respects George W. Bush's intelligence.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Oct 15, 2000

Roll out the mauve carpet and put the sake on ice

When I heard that the ambassador of Haiti and a voodoo priest would be visiting my house, I rushed around in a flurry to get things ready. After all, how often do you have an ambassador and a voodoo priest in your house at the same time?
EDITORIALS
Oct 14, 2000

Tread carefully with Pyongyang

The United States and North Korea do not have diplomatic relations. Technically, they are still at war. That has not stopped them from negotiating important issues, but the lack of an official relationship has complicated already difficult talks. Now, however, the two countries are moving toward reconciliation....
JAPAN
Oct 14, 2000

Foot-cult followers file damages lawsuit

A group of 46 people filed a lawsuit Friday against the Honohana Sanpogyo foot-reading cult, demanding the sect pay around 400 million yen in compensation for allegedly swindling money from them.

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