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COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Sep 8, 2007

Japanese-English holds key to Japan

I sleep with a purple hippo, a cow, and a dog. And now, Japan is finally making sense to me. For years this country had eluded me with its cute characters and mascots made to resemble animal-like something or others, and creative blobs with eyes and fuzzy ears representing new species of thingamajigs....
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Sep 8, 2007

Lilian Mendes Kano

"Despite our big, multilayered, newcomer community in Japan, the truth is that not much is known here about the variety and richness of Brazilian culture and society. It is really rewarding for me to show aspects of my home country, beyond carnival, soccer and the Amazon, that people have never imagined."...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 7, 2007

'Sad Vacation'

Shinji Aoyama makes films about extreme emotional dysfunction and dislocation, whose central characters include victims and perpetrators of desperate acts and terrible crimes — sometimes within the same person.
LIFE / Language
Sep 4, 2007

Garnish your Japanese with some 'humble pie'

Second of two parts
MORE SPORTS
Sep 4, 2007

Kenyan distance legend praises athletes' showing

OSAKA — Kipchoge "Kip" Keino made his Olympic debut at the 1964 Tokyo Summer Games. Forty-three years later, the Kenyan legend was back in Japan, watching hundreds of elite athletes vie for world titles.
EDITORIALS
Sep 2, 2007

Aging bridges of Japan

The collapse a month ago of a freeway bridge over the Mississippi River near downtown Minneapolis offers an important lesson for Japan, where a large number of bridges are expected to reach the end of their useful life in the near future. The collapse points to the danger inherent in old infrastructure...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Sep 2, 2007

Danjuro Ichikawa: Destined to act wild

When Danjuro Ichikawa stomps around the stage in flamboyant costumes, his face painted in red-and-white makeup and his voice virtually bellowing, it is kabuki in its rawest, most dramatic form. This actor and his ancestors through 11 previous generations have been wreaking havoc in the elegant world...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Sep 1, 2007

The honorable language

Whenever the work and weariness of life fills my house with gloom, the one sure way to drive away the clouds and ring in the laughter is this:
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 31, 2007

'Hero'

The ways of Japanese TV drama producers must be as mysterious to their Hollywood counterparts as the statues of Easter Island.
COMMENTARY
Aug 30, 2007

Happiness can't be legislated

LONDON — The question is topical because economists and other experts are increasingly doubting whether existing policies, such as steps to increase economic growth, really add to people's welfare and contentment.
COMMENTARY
Aug 28, 2007

Thai character trumps flaws of politics

LOS ANGELES — When social scientists or journalists are in doubt, sometimes it's best to consult the artist.
Japan Times
LIFE
Aug 26, 2007

Homegrown art: rice-paddy ukiyo-e

Mysterious "corn circles" of incredible complexity that appear overnight, or a baseball park as in the 1989 film "Field of Dreams" — who knows what you might come across in your local rural idyll these days.
COMMENTARY
Aug 23, 2007

Britain's retreat from Iraq

LONDON — "The British have given up and they know they will be leaving Iraq soon," said Muqtada Al-Sadr, head of the Mahdi army, the country's most powerful militia group, in an interview with the Independent. "They have realized this is not a war they should be fighting or one they can win."
LIFE / Lifestyle
Aug 21, 2007

Ten seconds to duck 'n' cover

With the annual Sept. 1 Disaster Prevention Day approaching, residents in Japan will be reminded of a simple fact: They are living in a country where earthquakes are a fact of life.
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
Aug 19, 2007

Mere death needn't be a barrier to enjoying a nice cup of tea with the deceased

'Tick, tock, tick, tock," goes the clock of human life. Living with regrets is one of the hardest things to do. What if your dad died and you hadn't had that last cup of tea with him? Not much you can do about that — or so you might think.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 17, 2007

'Factotum'

The work of poet/author Charles Bukowski, America's "Budweiser Baudelaire," has always had a kind of contradictory appeal. On the one hand, Bukowski, a misanthropic alcoholic, delivered a harsh, no-holds-barred account of life on the skid-row underbelly of society. And yet he did so with such prosaic...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 16, 2007

"Hiroshi Teshigahara"

Museum of Modern Art, Saitama Closes in 53 days
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 16, 2007

Quentin Tarantino: a B-movie badass

The Japanophile U.S. director talks about his love of trashy '70s cinema and why his latest film looks like it was put through a blender
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 16, 2007

Obsessed with the super-real

Regardless of one's own relationship to religion, many of us are disposed to believe we can transcend the present world, rising above it to another super-reality, to a surreal world.
Japan Times
Reference / Special Presentations / WITNESS TO WAR
Aug 15, 2007

Surrender spared a young, doubting kamikaze

If Masamichi Shida, 80, had known a bit more about the world back in 1942, he might never have become a kamikaze.
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Aug 12, 2007

Forsake not the elderly, for they bear a great bounty

They are remodeling the station near where I work in Tokyo, and I marvel at the diligence of the security guards directing pedestrians inconvenienced by the building work. Virtually all the guards are seniors, most likely retirees from other forms of employment. I usually arrive at my station by 6 a.m.,...
CULTURE / Books
Aug 12, 2007

Nothing romantic about being yakuza

Yakuza Moon: Memoirs of a Gangster's Daughter by Shoko Tendo, translated by Louise Heal. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2007, 192 pp., $22.95 (cloth) The late author Koji Kata, a prolific chronicler of crime in contemporary Japan, once observed, "Nobody ever set out in life with the aim of becoming...
LIFE
Aug 12, 2007

Has another society of such superlatives ever existed at all?

The fascination of the Heian Period (794-1185) lies in the fact that in all world history there is nothing quite like it. It would be hard to imagine a culture more exclusive, more fastidiously refined, more smugly incurious about the unknown, more unwarlike, more tearfully melancholic, more sensitive...
BASKETBALL / HOOP SCOOP
Aug 11, 2007

Albirex stand tall for Niigata

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.''
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 10, 2007

Wise-guy George woos Tokyo

It's not clear whether George Clooney was in character for his Tokyo press conference (along with "Ocean's Thirteen" producer Jerry Weintraub), or whether he'd just been knocking back the hooch with lunch, but either way, he rarely answered a question straight.
Japan Times
SOCCER
Aug 8, 2007

Unheralded Giovani leads Barcelona squad past F. Marinos

YOKOHAMA — Japanese fans caught a glimpse of Barcelona's dazzling attacking triumvirate of Thierry Henry, Ronaldinho and Samuel Eto'o, but it was little-known Mexican Giovani who did what the crowd craved from the three superstars with a late second-half goal in a 1-0 friendly win over Yokohama F....
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 6, 2007

Don't play politics with lifesaving DDT

NEW DELHI — The specter of malaria, dengue fever and many other mosquito-borne diseases stalk the world. Despite its deserved reputation as being one of cleanest, pest-free countries in Asia, even Singapore is battling to cope with a rash of dengue cases.
Reader Mail
Aug 5, 2007

Burden should rest on the state

Having been called and served on juries several times during my life, including one case of homicide, I cannot understand all the anguish that is taking place over the new lay judge/jury system set to begin in Japan in a couple years.
EDITORIALS
Jul 31, 2007

A devastating defeat for Mr. Abe

In Sunday's Upper House election, Japanese voters expressed their dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party, which has been embroiled in a pension-records fiasco, political-funds scandals and gaffes by Cabinet ministers. The votes have made the opposition Democratic...
COMMENTARY
Jul 30, 2007

Blame game since Lockerbie

LONDON — Libya is the land of make-believe, and from a safe distance it can seem comical. The 65-year-old teenager who runs the place, Col. Moammar Gadhafi, has an even stronger commitment to fashion than my 15-year-old daughter (although she has much better taste). But it's a very ugly regime close...

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