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Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Apr 20, 2005

'S wonderful: Wiling away the time with Caetano Veloso

Caetano is here. Caetano Veloso. The man who has been hailed for decades in his native Brazil as a singer, composer, poet and revolutionary, and commonly celebrated abroad as the 'Bob Dylan of Brazil,' despite his dislike for such labels.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / CERAMIC SCENE
Apr 20, 2005

The Koreans who potted in Kyushu

Japan has long been fascinated with outside influences, and voraciously absorbs them in order to create something totally unique. This can be found in almost all aspects of Japanese industry and culture -- and it is nowhere more apparent than in the pottery born in Kyushu. Of course, ancient kilns dating...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Apr 20, 2005

The painter's art is mud

Regarded as Spain's greatest living artist, Catalan painter Antoni Tapies (born 1923) is the subject of a comprehensive retrospective currently showing at the Hara Museum of Art in Tokyo's Shinagawa Ward.
JAPAN
Apr 18, 2005

Princess marks her last birthday in palace

Princess Nori, the only daughter of Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, offered thanks to her parents as she turned 36 on Monday, her last birthday as an Imperial family member before leaving the palace to marry a commoner.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Apr 17, 2005

Forgetting the world

ZHUANGZI: Basic Writings, translated by Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, 164 pp., $19.50 (paper). Zhuangzi (369-286 B.C.), along with Laozi, author of the founding tracts of Daoism, argued against Confucius, upheld the freedom of the individual as opposed to a socially circumscribed...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Apr 13, 2005

Kent Nagano conducts former collaborator Takemitsu

Kent Nagano is nothing if not a very busy man. The musical director of the Los Angeles Opera, the artistic director and chief conductor of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, Berlin, and the guest director of many world-famous orchestras, the California native is in demand as one of the most popular opera...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Apr 9, 2005

2005: A sneeze odyssey

As she springs toward her second half-century of life, my always-young wife is afraid of but one thing.
SOCCER / PREMIER REPORT
Apr 8, 2005

Brawl with Dyer just the latest transgression by Bowyer

LONDON -- Sticking up for Lee Bowyer is like putting in a good word for Jack The Ripper.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Apr 3, 2005

Religious liaisons: A voice from the void

LETTERS OF THE NUN ESHINNI: Images of Pure Land Buddhism in Medieval Japan, by James C. Dobbins. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004, 261 pp., with b/w illustrations, $60 (cloth). In 1921 a cache of papers was found in the archives of the Nishi Honganji temple in Kyoto. They were written by a...
Features
Apr 3, 2005

Does language 'difficulty' speak of a sense beyond mere words?

I have often been told by Japanese people that theirs is the most difficult language in the world. Virtually all the Japanese people who have said this to me, I might add, have spoken no other language than their own.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Apr 3, 2005

The rebirth of a salesman

For Atsushi Yamada, conductor of the New York City Opera, his presentation of Giacomo Puccini's opera "Madame Butterfly" to be staged in Tokyo and Nagoya in May will be something of a triumphant return.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Mar 29, 2005

Exhausted Kurds desperate to leave

Two large portraits adorn the walls of the otherwise colorless apartment in a Tokyo charity home that Meryem Dogan shares with her two young children.
Features
Mar 27, 2005

Mrs. Matsui

It was an open secret in my husband's course on modern Japanese literature at Radcliffe in the 1960s that his inspiration came not directly from the prose and poetry of Japan but from his absolute devotion to me.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Mar 27, 2005

A fully not-boring Indian adventure

SHANTARAM, by Gregory David Roberts. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004, 936 pp., $24.95 (cloth). The lives that some people lead can put fiction to shame. One such example would be Australian novelist Gregory David Roberts, a former heroin addict who held up banks with a toy pistol. Apprehended and...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Mar 27, 2005

First, stop, look and listen

THE SINGLE TONE: A Personal Journey into Shakuhachi Music, by Christopher Yohmei Blasdel, Tokyo: Printed Matter Press, 2005, 168 pp., with photographs and glossary, 1,500 yen (paper). In the summer of 1972 Christopher Blasdel first came to Japan. He was from West Texas, "a landscape dominated by strip...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Mar 26, 2005

On catching your spouse's culture

There's this lady I know who has one major gripe about life in Japan.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Mar 20, 2005

Expectations in the Sundarbans

THE HUNGRY TIDE, by Amitav Ghosh. HarperCollins, 2004, 403 pp., £10.99 (paper). Piyali Roy, the daughter of Bengali immigrants to the United States, is spotted standing on a railway platform. She is dressed in the clothes "of a teenage boy." The man who distinguishes her from the crowd, as a stranger...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM MOSCOW
Mar 20, 2005

Artwork unfurled without a destination

MOSCOW -- To be popular with art historians, you have to be a dead Italian male. Everyone else is suspect to tenured professors and critics, particularly if the work is going to last for just 16 days and is made of nylon and steel. Such was the case with a revolutionary project by Christo and Jeanne-Claude,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Mar 16, 2005

A baroque approach

With his keen, adventurous musical intellect and an interpretative idiosyncrasy that breathes new life into the standard repertoire, Dutch cellist Pieter Wispelwey is fast assuming a hallowed place in the cellist pantheon. Influenced by the revolutionary Early Music movement in the Netherlands under...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Mar 12, 2005

International symposium to focus on kids' health

As director of the Department of Interdisciplinary Medicine at the National Center for Child Health and Development in Setagaya,Tokyo, Dr. John Ichiro Takayama is right now an especially busy man.
EDITORIALS
Mar 11, 2005

Recalling the alternative to peace

It has been 60 years since U.S. bombers destroyed much of Tokyo in the spring of 1945. Survivors of the "Great Tokyo Air Raids" -- most of them now in their 70s and 80s -- are few and far between. Words like "B-nijuku" (B-29), "bokugo" (air-raid shelter) and "shoidan" (incendiary bomb) are no longer...
MORE SPORTS
Mar 5, 2005

Marinos face major threat from rejuvenated Jubilo

Here is a team-by-team preview of the 18 clubs in the J. League's first division this season:
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK
Mar 3, 2005

Unique 'twin' woods branch out

Our little Afan Woodland Trust here in Kurohime in Nagano Prefecture is twinned with the Afan Forest Park in South Wales. Most folk have heard of twinned cities (though I believe that Americans call them "sister cities"), but as far as I know, our twinning of forests is unique, and -- as sometimes happens...
Japan Times
Features / WEEK 3
Feb 20, 2005

Sit down and be counted!

One chilly Friday morning last month, high-school teacher Noriyuki Ishida had probably the most stressful experience of his 35-year career.
BUSINESS
Feb 17, 2005

Vstone leader Yamato gears up for RoboCup

OSAKA -- Members of Team OSAKA bubbled over with excitement after their teammate scored a goal in a penalty-kick shootout, leading the team to victory in a sort of world soccer championship. The little goal-scorer is a 39-cm humanoid robot named VisiON.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Feb 13, 2005

Japan makes great genres, but . . .

THE MIDNIGHT EYE GUIDE TO NEW JAPANESE FILM, by Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp, foreword by Hideo Nakata. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press. 366 pp., 151 b/w photos, $22.95 (paper). The authors of this very interesting new compendium on recent Japanese cinema would agree, I think, that the "new" in their title...
COMMUNITY
Feb 9, 2005

Prostitution, human trafficking thrive as a lucrative immorality

ISLAMABAD -- The countries making up the South Asia region support about one-quarter of the planet's population, with a large number of people unemployed and living below the poverty line. This socioeconomic situation has helped increase social crimes especially like human trafficking, especially of...
COMMENTARY
Feb 7, 2005

Bet on the sustainable option

In the 20th century, science and technology was aimed at contributing to economic development and growth. In the 21st century, though, it must seek to promote sustainable development.

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