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Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 2, 2016

Japan's picture ID before World War II

Last year, the number of tourists coming into Japan outnumbered those going out for the first time in 45 years. In absolute terms, it may be the first time that tourism has properly taken off for this country, despite numerous attempts by various ministries and semi-official agencies over the years to...
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 7, 2015

Thailand's generals shoot economy in the foot

Thailand's military junta lacks the vision to fix an economy in disarray.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Nov 12, 2015

Cero helps radio station InterFM897 celebrate its new look

The members of Cero have just finished recording their radio show, "Night Drifter," when I meet them at the InterFM897 studios in Tokyo's Shinagawa Ward. When I walk into the studio, one of the group immediately points out my T-shirt, which has an air-brushed depiction of a beach at sunset with the word...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / BACKSTREET STORIES
Sep 26, 2015

Circumnavigating joys in Kaminoge

Decades ago, I strolled around the quiet neighborhood of Kaminoge in Setagaya Ward with professor Shuichi Kato, the scholar who convinced me to come study in Tokyo. I vividly recollect, on my first day in Japan, encountering the fragrance of tiny orange kinmokusei (fragrant olive) blossoms as Kato spoke...
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design
Jun 6, 2015

Refusing to check out of the Hotel Okura

With the iconic landmark poised to close for renovation in August, we explore its significance to the development of modernist architecture in Tokyo.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jun 2, 2015

Painting women of Japan

Ask an art lover to name Japanese women artists active before the 20th century, and chances are they'll draw a blank, despite the fact that many highly accomplished women were painting in far-earlier times.
Japan Times
SOCCER / PREMIER REPORT
Apr 24, 2015

Mourinho's strategy effective if not entertaining

To Jose Mourinho, winning is the ultimate entertainment.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Mar 5, 2015

Parasophia to take Kyoto into the now

What goes through your head when you look at contemporary art? Standing in front of, say, Damien Hirst's shark in formaldehyde ("Is this art or taxidermy?"), Tracey Emin's bed ("Anybody could do that"), Jeff Koon's giant balloon-like poodles ("Kitsch," or "preemptive kitsch," as one critic called them)...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Mar 4, 2015

John Caird delivers home truths with 'Twelfth Night'

As an Honorary Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, John Caird may be one of the leading pillars of the English theater establishment, but in a recent interview with The Japan Times, this acclaimed director of plays, musicals and opera declared, "In a sense, some part of me is becoming...
Japan Times
MORE SPORTS / MAN ABOUT SPORTS
Feb 12, 2015

Tyson-Douglas anniversary brings back mixed emotions

For MAS, it was the best — and worst — of times.
Japan Times
MORE SPORTS / TYSON-DOUGLAS SHOCKER REVISITED
Feb 6, 2015

Lampley remembers historic fight in Tokyo

Second in a series
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / BLACK EYE
Dec 17, 2014

Japan and others gain from Jamaican brain drain

In the last part of this series on Jamaicans in Japan, Baye McNeil speaks to a teacher, author and poet in Yokohama and an attorney in Tokyo.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Nov 5, 2014

Street-dance show's dazzling 'tribute to manga' hits the spot

Street-dance types in Japan can often be seen working on their moves in parks or in front of big plate-glass windows, but in Britain the dance movement is being taken to an entirely new level.
OLYMPICS / ROBERT WHITING'S 1964 OLYMPICS RETROSPECTIVE
Oct 10, 2014

Olympic construction transformed Tokyo

The 1964 Tokyo Olympics had a profound impact on the capital city and the nation. In the opening installment of a five-part series that will run during the next two weeks, best-selling author Robert Whiting, who lived in Japan at the time, takes a look back at the preparations for the event.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle / CHILD'S PLAY
Sep 12, 2014

For toddlers, Anpanman doesn't have a use-by date

He has a big red nose, two rosy cheeks and an edible head that is regularly rebaked in his uncle's oven.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 28, 2014

She came, she stole and she conquered

In my family of many brothers, the "Lupin III" animated TV series was the only program we could agree to watch. Once the electric guitar riffs of the Yuji Ohno-penned theme song began, a blissful peace descended on our living room. The fighting stopped and all eyes were glued to the family's beat-up...
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / A TASTE OF HOME
Jul 1, 2014

Gunma's 'Brazil Town' offers a carnival of cuisine

This month A Taste of Home is taking a field trip to Oizumi, Gunma Prefecture. Oizumi, an otherwise ordinary town, is home to roughly 4,000 Brazilians — about one-tenth of the local population. Most of them work in nearby factories (Subaru is a big one). But some of them are working to make life a...
Japan Times
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
May 25, 2014

Learning Japanese by singing along

Several years before I was taught to read and sing the traditional song 「さくら、さくら」("Sakura, sakura") in introductory Japanese class, I recall driving my father's 1963 Ford Galaxie and humming along to the melody of Kyu Sakamoto's "Sukiyaki Song," broadcast over WFAY AM radio in North...
SOCCER / PREMIER REPORT
May 2, 2014

Gerrard may end up tragic figure in Liverpool's title bid

One mistake during a 38-game season does not decide who wins the title, but Steven Gerrard will be haunted for the rest of his life if Liverpool does not win the Premier League.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Feb 26, 2014

Flying high, but not quite buzzing

I have vivid childhood memories of two circuses: Ringling Brothers and Shrine. The latter was a delightfully shabby affair held in an old auditorium where audiences sat on concrete bleachers that were occasionally adorned with tacky plastic chairs. There were lots of animals, and the holding areas outside...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Jan 10, 2014

Educator with a mission sends out support from Hiroshima

Some people seem to have a knack for turning their hand to anything that comes along and, moreover, making a success of it. This is certainly the case with Hiroshima-based Adam Beck. Over the years, the American has been a children's theater director, an English teacher, a newspaper columnist and the...
CULTURE / Film
Dec 7, 2013

Re-examining Yasujiro Ozu on film

Yasujiro Ozu once had a reputation for making films only other Japanese could understand.
Japan Times
WORLD / Society
Sep 20, 2013

Richard Dawkins: 'I don't think I am strident or aggressive'

On the top floor of Random House's offices in London, the world's number one thinker — according to Prospect magazine's annual poll — walks in from the roof terrace and shakes my hand. Richard Dawkins is a trim 72-year-old with one of those faces that, no matter the accumulation of lines, will always...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jun 27, 2013

Sincerity is the new ecstasy in Funkot's 'Summer of Love'

At the end of the 1980s, British DJs imported a potent new style of house music from the Spanish party island Ibiza in what came to be known as the ecstasy-fueled "Second Summer of Love." Inspired by this trade route two decades later, Katsumi Takano, aka Mandokoro or DJ Jet Baron, hopes to launch a...
Japan Times
CULTURE / CULTURE SMASH
Jun 12, 2013

Preserving a classic Japanese art form: tokusatsu magic

Our monster is scaly, spiky, reptilian — a cross between a dinosaur and an irradiated insect that shrieks like an angry bird. Our hero is lean, faintly muscular in a rubbery skintight suit with inscrutable praying-mantis eyes. They face one another, stomping left to right like sumo wrestlers, posing...
SPORTS / MAN ABOUT SPORTS
Jun 5, 2013

Lack of American heavyweights sad

What if they held a world heavyweight title fight and no one in America showed up?
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Apr 7, 2013

Shigeru Ban: 'People's architect' combines permanence and paper

Generally speaking, an architect's style is defined by particular forms or shapes. There's Frank Lloyd Wright's prominent horizontal lines, for instance; Le Corbusier's simple white boxes; or, more recently, the deliberately abstract masses of Frank Gehry — of Guggenheim Bilbao fame.
CULTURE / Music
Mar 14, 2013

Miyabi Matsuoka takes an enlightened approach to teaching the harp

To Miyabi Matsuoka, the harp is a mirror that reveals who you really are. She says she can tell the personality of a harp player by the way he or she manipulates the instrument, which affects the sound they create.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Dec 2, 2012

Michael Woodford: Japan's whistle-blower supreme speaks out

Michael Woodford glances out of the floor-to-ceiling window of his multimillion-pound loft apartment, which looks out across the River Thames toward the City of London, the so-called Square Mile that is among the world's leading financial and commercial centers.
CULTURE / Books
Nov 18, 2012

Minor Soseki work gets first English translation

NOWAKI, by Natsume Soseki, translated and with an afterword by William N. Ridgeway. Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2011, 120 pp., $15 (paperback) As the translator notes in his afterword, and Donald Keene and Angela Yiu suggest in quotations used as blurbs on the back cover,...

Longform

The byzantine process for converting a foreign driver’s license into a Japanese one entails mountains of paperwork and significant stamina — unless you're a lucky license holder from a country or region where these requirements are waived.
Driving in Japan isn’t hard. Getting the license is.