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JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Apr 5, 2009

Dead ends, about turns abound in the politics of roads

About a year ago, the government was all in a lather about extending the gasoline tax. Local governments and the ruling coalition, not to mention interested bureaucracies, wanted to continue the tax because they said the revenues were necessary to build more roads. Opposition parties were against the...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music / FUZZY LOGIC
Mar 27, 2009

Guitar Wolf return to silence the lambs

"We've come back and we're going to attack your planet with humongous love," says Seiji (that's Mr. Guitar Wolf himself) as he downs vegetable juice at a Jonathan's family restuarant near Yoga Station in western Tokyo.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Mar 21, 2009

Activist views homeless in realistic light

Social activist Makoto Yuasa caused a stir by bringing poverty out into the open when he teamed up with unions and nonprofit organizations to open a tent village for jobless people in Tokyo's Hibiya Park over the yearend holidays.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Feb 22, 2009

Volatile and barren, yet beautiful and alluring

The Great Gobi Desert is one of the most inhospitable of all places. It covers 13 million square kilometers of Central Asia and is the land furthest removed from any sea or ocean. This results in a volatile climate, fierce winds and massive sandstorms. The few inhabitants of the place say that you can...
COMMUNITY / Voices / HOTLINE TO NAGATACHO
Feb 17, 2009

Kanagawa Prefecture can be Japan's clean-air trailblazer

Dear Kanagawa Gov. Shigefumi Matsuzawa,
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Feb 13, 2009

Towa Tei wallows in optimism for art's sake

"In Tokyo, there is too much information," says famed Japanese producer and DJ Towa Tei. "Even if you don't want to listen to music, you are raped into listening to something you don't like at the convenience store. So I try to go somewhere quiet and listen whenever I want to!"
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 23, 2009

Crossing borderlines of consciousness

Most of us have experienced waking up in a strange room, perhaps in a hotel or a friend's house, and, for a split second, not knowing where we are — that fuzzy, vague feeling in the twilight zone between waking and dreaming. Imagine having those same feelings when waking up in your own, usually familiar,...
Reader Mail
Dec 25, 2008

Hardly a wilderness for cuisine

Regarding Robbie Swinnerton's Dec. 19 article, "Northern Tokyo's top-notch Italian": I had no problem with the review of the restaurant itself in this article, which lived up to Swinnerton's usually good standard. What I did feel aggrieved by was the patronizing tone of the article toward the area in...
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design
Dec 7, 2008

Tadao Ando: Icon and iconoclast

One of the first houses built by Japan's most famous architect, Tadao Ando, is centered around an open atrium. That sounds nice until you realize that the atrium forms the only "corridor" between each of the rooms. Fancy a hot cup of tea before bed on a rainy winter's night? You'll need an umbrella and...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Dec 5, 2008

In Fukuoka, we're walking in a winter ramen land

Winter whistles through the streets, slips its icy fingers down your coat, and you search for something, just about anything, to ward off the damp chill of a Japanese winter. Suddenly, you know with all certainty the one true cure — ramen.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 4, 2008

An audience with Miyazaki, Japan's animation king

Hayao Miyazaki says he doesn't like giving interviews, but the Oscar-winning, megahit-making animator has strong opinions he isn't shy about sharing, as a packed room of reporters learned when he appeared at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo on Nov. 20.
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 3, 2008

Hillary has earned a place on the world stage

NEW YORK — So, why did he do it? What led U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to tap his former adversary, Sen. Hillary Clinton, to serve as his secretary of state, the face and voice of his foreign policy, his emissary to the world?
EDITORIALS
Nov 9, 2008

Urban economic inequality

A recent report from the U.N. Human Settlements Program (UN-HABITAT) reveals that inequality is increasing around the world in major cities. The generally accepted measure of income inequality, the Gini coefficient (where 1.0 signifies complete inequality and 0.0, complete equality) has been rising in...
Reader Mail
Oct 5, 2008

Tourists swim against the tide

Regarding the Oct. 1 article "New tourism agency to act as policy 'control tower' ": If Japan wants to attract more tourists, city officials can begin by putting their international tourist information offices in easily accessible public places and making information signs VERY clear.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 12, 2008

Tarsem talks us through his fantasy world

A lot of people get out of film school full of ideas, but when faced with the reality of making a living, they decide to make commercials or a formulaic Hollywood movie or two. Still, they think, "Once I make some money, I'm gonna take my millions and make the films I really want to make."
Japan Times
JAPAN / LETTERS FROM KOBE
Sep 5, 2008

Letter trove details Occupation life

More than 1,000 pages of handwritten letters from 1947 to 1948 by an American woman who witnessed and described in detail the Allied Occupation of Japan have been discovered in Nebraska and recently obtained by The Japan Times.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 5, 2008

Cardiff band get Los in translation

Los Campesinos!, a pop septet from Cardiff, Wales, were an inspired choice to open the Marine Stadium stage at Summer Sonic Tokyo last month. Each tune kicks off with a catchy riff and proceeds to burn rocket fuel as lead vocalist Gareth twitches and yelps — nothing the band plays is slow, or even...
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK
Sep 3, 2008

Thinking out of the box

Twenty something years ago, when we started to buy badly abused and neglected woodland here in the Nagano Prefecture hills, one of the problems that became very obvious was the lack of housing. Not for me, but for the woodland creatures.
CULTURE / Books
Aug 31, 2008

Spain to China: Letters of a lasting friendship

AUSTIN COATES: Souvenirs and Letters, by Ramon Rodamilans. London: Athena Press, 2007, 140 pp, £5.99 (paper) The Spanish author of this memoir recognizes early on just how much his subject, the British writer and historian Austin Coates (1922-97), like Coates' Vietnamese companion, "came from south-east...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Aug 5, 2008

Schools aim to cultivate returnee students' 'second culture'

Yuki, 7, zooms around the school lounge in her neon T-shirt, hugging teachers, gesturing wildly, making jokes and chattering away in perfect English. Yuki is Japanese and learned English when her family lived in Los Angeles for two years. She is affectionate and expressive, or at least she is on Saturdays...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 23, 2008

Australia's pollution problem

SYDNEY — Are we for real in all this talk about saving the world from pollution? Just as Australia announces it will slash carbon emissions, it prepares to flood the world with carbon-belching coal.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jul 10, 2008

Island chanteuse Hajime finds tranquillity on Saturn

It wouldn't be the obvious place to look. And yet singer Hajime Chitose was seeking a new peace of mind when, 1.3 billion km away, she found what she was looking for.
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Jul 9, 2008

Nature stifling wind power in Japan

CHOSHI, Chiba Pref. — About a 2 1/2-hour drive east of central Tokyo, on the edge of the Kanto plain, stands one of the closest wind farms to the capital, whirring away as it generates up to 25,500 kw of clean electricity.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Jul 6, 2008

Peace follows turbulent times

"It was a nightmare," laughs Tokyo-based author David Peace of a recent trip to Paris to promote the French version of his most successful novel, "The Damned Utd."
Japan Times
BASKETBALL / HOOP SCOOP
Jun 29, 2008

Japanese-American coach Walters aims to restore USF to glory

Let's take a trip down memory lane.

Longform

Mamoru Iwai, stationmaster of Keisei Ueno Station, says that, other than earthquake-proofing, the former Hakubutsukan-Dobutsuen (Museum-Zoo) Station has remained untouched.
Inside Tokyo's 'phantom' stations — and the stories they tell