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September 04, 2025
 

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COMMUNITY
Sep 24, 2001

Tyndale and the English Bible

History sometimes fails to recognize the brilliance of a true pioneer, glorifying those who profit from his innovation while conveniently forgetting the source.
CULTURE / Stage
Aug 22, 2001

Noda's kabuki brings the house down

The lobby of the Kabuki-za in Higashi Ginza -- the mecca of kabuki -- was swarming with people last week, ahead of the start of this year's noryo kabuki (summer festival of kabuki).
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Aug 12, 2001

To know us is to love us

ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE KEY WORDS FOR UNDERSTANDING JAPAN (Nippon o Shiru Hyakugosho). Tokyo: Corona Books/Heibonsha, 2001, bilingual (Japanese/English) edition. 328 pp. 205 plates, color, b/w. 2000 yen. This country has an abiding faith in the power of understanding. If we just understood each other,...
CULTURE / Film
Jul 25, 2001

Stranded on Planet Hollywood

Planet of the Apes Rating: * * Director: Tim Burton Running time: 120 minutes Language: EnglishNow showing Michael Clarke Duncan in Tim Burton's "Planet of the Apes" -- (C)2001 Twentieth Century Fox Director Tim Burton is quite clear on this matter: His version of "Planet of the Apes" is no mere "remake"...
CULTURE / Books
Jul 15, 2001

Controversial textbooks are big sellers for Fusosha

The latest best seller, oddly enough, is a junior high school history textbook. After going on sale on June 1, "Atarashii Rekishi Kyokasho" has been at or near the top of the best-seller list and the related social studies text "Atarashii Komin Kyokasho" in the top 10. Already 500,000 copies of the history...
CULTURE / Film
Jul 4, 2001

To shoot up, perchance to dream

Requiem for a Dream Rating: * * * * 1/2 Director: Darren Aronofsky Running time: 102 minutes Language: English Opens July 7 at Cine Saison in Shibuya An AP report the other day told of a Beijing teenager who jumped four stories to his death while attempting to sneak out to a local Internet cafe. His...
EDITORIALS
Jul 1, 2001

Drivers' rights on the line

Hello, New York! You listening? Welcome to another small corner of the convoluted world of unenforceable legislation.
CULTURE / Books
Jun 17, 2001

Sounds of a poet who writes to live, and lives to write

COLLECTED POEMS OF SHUNTARO TANIKAWA, CD-ROM. Iwanami Shoten Publishers, Tokyo, 2000, 19,000 yen. It's been a recent trend in the music industry to come out with boxed sets commemorating the work of some of our most celebrated musicians, from John Coltrane to the Beatles. That such a trend has spread...
COMMUNITY / THE PARENT TRIP
Jun 8, 2001

Trips, tripwires of expat parenthood

Life with Corey started long before we even knew what his name was to be. On a summer day in 1999, we were shown the first confirmatory ultrasound after pregnancy was suspected -- he was the size of a pea, if that. From there, we watched him progress through the months in a series of ever-more pronounced...
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 3, 2001

Can Koizumi turn popularity into power?

Looking at Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's popularity and its spillover effect on the Liberal Democratic Party, one has to be impressed. Recent highly popular actions, such as the prime minister's decision not to challenge a court decision awarding compensation to leprosy victims, only add to the...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Jun 3, 2001

Lessons in crisis mismanagement

All my life I have been behind the times. I wore my bell-bottoms for years after the fashion had died, and in fact only abandoned them after they had shrunk up and become sort of bell-knickers.
CULTURE / Books
May 20, 2001

Fortress Japan? Blame MacArthur and his team

THE GENESIS OF THE JAPANESE FOREIGN INVESTMENT LAW OF 1950, by Richard Rabinowitz. German-Japanese Lawyers' Association Vol. 10, 1999, 11,000 yen, $ 84.50. In 1853, Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay and demanded that Japan's quasi-military government allow foreign trade. The resulting interactions...
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 14, 2001

Korean impasse is U.S.' fault

SEOUL -- "Sooner or later, the North Koreans will return to the negotiating table," said South Korea's former Foreign Minister Lee Joung Binn in an interview on the eve of his resignation. At this moment, political realities on the Korean Peninsula don't seem to justify his optimism. As the government...
CULTURE / Film
Apr 11, 2001

Comical Sturm und Drang , all in the family

Rendan Rating: * * * * Director: Naoto Takenaka Running time: 104 minutes Language: JapaneseNow playing "What does woman want?" Freud famously asked -- a question that is just as famously unanswerable. At the dawn of the modern feminist era, however, many women seemed to want what Anais Nin, in a 1974...
CULTURE / Books
Apr 7, 2001

A bibliophile's whodunit: Who is killing the book?

Who is killing the book in Japan? That is the provocative question posed by veteran nonfiction writer Shin'ichi Sano in his recent book of the same title ("Dare ga 'hon' o korosu no ka," President Sha, 1,800 yen).
JAPAN
Mar 27, 2001

War flick touting Japan's role in Indonesia's birth irks Jakarta

A new Japanese film depicting the role of Imperial Japanese Army soldiers in Indonesia's war for independence from the Netherlands highlights a stark difference in views between Indonesians and Japanese over the republic's 1945 birth.
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Mar 1, 2001

NHK's hollow take on easy-money bubble era

What's impressive about the new Steven Soderbergh film, "Traffic," which opens here in April, is how thoroughly it presents all the ramifications of America's drug war by exclusively dramatic means: no charts, no explanations of cause and effect, no polemics. The movie's three separate plot vectors intersect...
COMMUNITY
Feb 11, 2001

The accidental ambassadors

Less than six months after bathing in the international attention that came with hosting the Olympic Games, Australians are celebrating their nation's 100th birthday.
COMMENTARY
Feb 3, 2001

Bush can win over African Americans

WASHINGTON -- America's 2000 election was essentially a tie. President George W. Bush won among whites, but received only about 10 percent of black votes. What he should do to reach out to minorities has generated a torrent of political commentary.
CULTURE / Music
Jan 26, 2001

ATDI: scary monsters and super afros

If there's any doubt as to how beholden Rolling Stone magazine is to the record industry (or, for that matter, Hollywood), all one has to do is take a look at their Best Album list for 2000 and note that there isn't an indie release in the whole batch. What's more, the best new band is At the Drive-In,...
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 14, 2001

How Washington turns virtue into vice

WASHINGTON -- Only in the morally sick society of Washington would the charitable actions of Linda Chavez, George Bush's nominee for labor secretary, be condemned as political vices rather than celebrated as civic virtues. Her withdrawal of her candidacy unveils the perverse policies that the new administration...
LIFE / Digital
Jan 10, 2001

Three decades of Mario and friends

In the beginning (about 30 years ago), geeky college students in the United States stole into engineering buildings at night and turned huge and expensive mainframes into playgrounds.
CULTURE / Books
Jan 5, 2001

Have Japanese novelists lost touch with readers?

The fading interest in reading among younger Japanese first caused alarm several years ago in Japan, but I was recently startled to see a full page devoted to the topic in The New York Times' Book Review section (Dec. 10).
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 30, 2000

Falling victim to U.S.-Chinese diplomacy

A 46-year-old man named Zhang Hongbao from Harbin, China is facing an uncertain fate in a cramped U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services detention cell in the U.S. territory of Guam. On one hand he is just another illegal immigrant, joining thousands of other Chinese who have attempted to settle...
CULTURE / Art
Dec 23, 2000

Freshly packaged desires on sale at Parco's "Point of Purchase"

Visually speaking, "Point of Purchase" has to be the busiest art exhibition in Tokyo at the moment. The pageantry of graffiti tags-cum-advertising signs is a lot of things: a throwback to yesterday's dorky company logos; a reminder that advertising is far more insidious these days; and a warning that...
CULTURE / Stage
Dec 10, 2000

The stuff that memories are made of

The performance company Dumb Type, based in Kyoto, has always been a bit of a political animal, an in-your-face shape-shifter through dance, the visual and plastic arts, text, conceptualized performance, mime, puppetry and film. And because it has been an enthusiastic investigator of gender politics,...
CULTURE / Music / PLAY BUTTON
Dec 8, 2000

Hanayo's gift wrapped in seductive complexity

With her mix of artifice, artistic discipline and sexual promise, no traditional figure is more ambiguous than the geisha.
EDITORIALS
Nov 30, 2000

Help society's youngest victims

It is a sad commentary on today's adults that the physical and psychological abuse of children is a growing and increasingly troubling phenomenon in Japan more than half a year after the Diet enacted a law prohibiting chronically abusive parents from meeting or corresponding with offspring they have...
CULTURE / Books
Nov 15, 2000

Textbooks in the service of the state

CENSORING HISTORY: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States, edited by Laura Hein and Mark Selden. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2000, 301 pp., $24.95. History loomed over the recent visit of Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji like a threatening storm cloud. But other than some scattered...
Surrounded by Chinese bases, a tiny Philippine island stands firm
A Philippine Navy sailor looks at a China Coast Guard vessel just off the coast of Pag-asa Island in the disputed South China Sea last month.
Anger in Japan after Instagrammer drinks burial site offering
Foreign tourists visit a park near the Imperial Palace in Tokyo in August.
Musk voices support for anti-immigration rally in Japan
Elon Musk has voiced support for anti-immigration protest in Japan, where a "Japanese First" party saw gains in recent elections.
Suntory CEO Takeshi Niinami resigns over alleged possession of illegal drugs
Takeshi Niinami, then-chief executive officer of Suntory Holdings, in May 2024
‘Mount Fuji Lawson’ becomes a symbol of Japan’s overtourism problem
A couple poses for a wedding photo in front of a Lawson in the town of Kawaguchiko, Yamanashi Prefecture, on Aug. 25.
Xi — joined by Kim and Putin — delivers stark warning at military parade
Chinese leader Xi Jinping walks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un before a military parade marking the 80th anniversary of victory over Japan and the end of World War II, in Beijing on Wednesday.
Tamagotchi hatches 100 million shipments worldwide thanks to ’90s nostalgia
The latest version of Tamagotchi, called Tamagotchi Paradise, is awarded the best digital toy at Tokyo Toy Show on Aug. 28.
Why Stalin didn’t invade Hokkaido still largely unknown, 80 years after WWII
During a survey to collect the remains of victims from the Taito Maru, one of the vessels involved in the Three Ships Incident, a metal helmet was found near the stern of the vessel on Aug. 5, 1984, at Rumoi Port. No human remains were discovered.
More sweltering days forecast for September after hottest summer on record
By the end of August, 8,341 people had been transported by ambulance for heatstroke in Tokyo alone.
Surrounded by Chinese bases, a tiny Philippine island stands firm
A Philippine Navy sailor looks at a China Coast Guard vessel just off the coast of Pag-asa Island in the disputed South China Sea last month.

Podcast

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.
Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Longform

Tetsuzo Shiraishi, speaking at The Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage, uses a thermos to explain how he experienced the U.S. firebombing of March 1945, when he was just 7 years old.
From ashes to high-rises: A survivor’s account of Tokyo’s postwar past
By Alex K.T. Martin

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Foreign wrestlers have a long history in sumo
Foreign wrestlers have a long history in sumo

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