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BUSINESS
Dec 11, 2008

Large firms turning to state as lender of last resort

The government may become the lender of last resort for large companies struggling to obtain financing as the economy worsens and the corporate bond market remains weak.
JAPAN
Dec 10, 2008

Aso to ask Wen about intrusion

Prime Minister Taro Aso will bring up the issue of China's intrusions into Japan's territorial waters near the Senkaku Islands when he meets with Chinese Premiere Wen Jiabao on Saturday in Fukuoka Prefecture, Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone said.
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Dec 10, 2008

BOJ urged to tackle credit crunch more aggressively

Bank of Japan Gov. Masaaki Shirakawa may be forced to adopt more aggressive measures to ease the credit shortage bedeviling companies, economists say.
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / STYLEWISE,ON: FASHION
Dec 9, 2008

Ann Demeulemeester retrospective, FouR T-shirts, Lithium Homme and LaForet Xmas 2008

Fashion blast from the past
JAPAN / EXPLAINER
Dec 9, 2008

Shinkansen about more than speed

Shinkansen stand as global symbols of Japanese technological innovation. Debuting just in time for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the bullet trains continue to carry people across the nation at record speed.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Dec 6, 2008

Armitage calls for active role

U.S.-Japan relations will remain the pillar of president-elect Barack Obama's foreign policy in Asia, but Tokyo must play its part if it hopes to remain in the "driver's seat," former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said Friday in Tokyo.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Dec 5, 2008

New tourism agency ambushed by high yen

When the Japan Tourism Agency opened for business on Oct. 1 to attract more Asian travelers, the timing could hardly have been worse.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 4, 2008

Alternate visions of island paradise

In our global information age, when all of us are exposed to more data than we can perhaps adequately manage, the appeal of cliches has never been stronger. By a process of reduction and crude characterization, that which is complex, ambiguous, and difficult-to- know becomes simple, and is summed up...
Reader Mail
Dec 4, 2008

Lessons maybe not so helpful

In his Dec. 1 article, "Look at the brighter side of the financial crisis," Tom Plate writes that the world has learned more helpful lessons from Asia than from the United States about how to handle one's economy, including lessons on saving money, significant reform, strong leadership, investment in...
COMMUNITY / Issues / JUST BE CAUSE
Dec 2, 2008

Hailing the tail end of Bush

Regarding Barack Obama's election as U.S. president, I welcome the groundswell of hope. It's about time. The past eight years have been, well, awkward for Americans overseas.
Japan Times
JAPAN / EXPLAINER
Dec 2, 2008

Soka Gakkai keeps religious, political machine humming

What do movie star Orlando Bloom, who plays young pirate Will Turner in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series, R&B diva Tina Turner and Shunsuke Nakamura, an ace midfielder for Scottish soccer team Celtic, have in common?
EDITORIALS
Dec 2, 2008

Political will on trade

The global financial crisis triggered by the subprime mortgage fiasco in the United States has not only caused the credit crunch but it has also shrunk demand, thus greatly harming the real economy. At a time when major economies face the danger of simultaneous recessions, leaders from the Asia-Pacific...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Nov 30, 2008

Kabuki rescued by national defeat

KABUKI'S FORGOTTEN WAR: 1931-1945, by James R. Brandon. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008, 466 pp., with photographs, $52 (cloth) The role that Japan's "classic" drama, kabuki, played during the 15-year "Sacred War" is largely undiscussed, and even in Japan itself it is usually ignored. Indeed,...
JAPAN
Nov 29, 2008

Fingerprint screening stops 846

The new biometric system that fingerprints and photographs all incoming foreigners at airports and seaports prevented 846 undesirables from entering the country over the past year, the Immigration Bureau said Friday.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Nov 28, 2008

Lisa Loeb

Now that it's almost December, there can be only one thing on the minds of kids around Japan: Um, summer camp?
Reader Mail
Nov 27, 2008

Steps to informed awareness

This is in reply to Philip White's Nov. 20 letter, "How to treat a wounded ASDF," which recommended, after Air Self-Defense chief Toshio Tamogami was sacked, "instilling a historically informed awareness that war and aggression are bad."
COMMENTARY
Nov 26, 2008

Common sense versus PC

Presumably the recent remarks of former infrastructure minister Nariaki Nakayama about Japan being ethnically homogeneous were correctly reported. If so his remarks were tactless, in view of Japan's Ainu population, but also showed an ignorance of history. The Japanese are generally considered to be...
BUSINESS
Nov 26, 2008

Hedge funds to draw interest as industry weathers storm: Credit Suisse

Japan's hedge-fund industry, dominated by so-called long-short funds that bet on rising and falling stock prices, will attract capital on signs they are starting to outperform their peers, Credit Suisse Group AG said.
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 25, 2008

Room for Asian influence in G20 structure

SINGAPORE — Finance ministers and central bank governors from the Group of 20 advanced and emerging economies have been meeting regularly for nearly a decade. But the decision to convene a summit of the G20 heads of government in Washington the weekend of Nov. 15 marked an important turning point in...
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Nov 25, 2008

The long Japanese love affair with foreign words, from sake to sōpurando

I wouldn't blame some readers for assuming that an article about foreign borrowings in these times of economic crisis would delve into the subprimal world of international finance. But I write this week and next not about leverage but linguistics.
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Nov 24, 2008

Burst of U.S. bubble arouses old specters

So the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has spoken: The "usual tools of economic policy — above all, the Federal Reserve's ability to pump up the economy by cutting interest rates — have lost all traction" ("Depression Economics Return," Nov. 14, The New York Times).
EDITORIALS
Nov 24, 2008

Increase peacekeeping efforts

Two officers of the Ground Self-Defense Force have been dispatched by the government to join the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) peace support operation in southern Sudan. The decision to dispatch them was made in early October on the basis of the 1992 international peace cooperation law. The...
EDITORIALS
Nov 23, 2008

Tough lessons in drug use

Until recently, Japan has not needed much of a drug policy, but recent headlines about "university pot busts" indicate one is overdue. Outside of Japan, marijuana arrests no longer even get space in newspapers, since access and use of marijuana is an everyday reality, unhealthy and questionable as it...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Nov 23, 2008

We're just playing ball

It's an open secret that TV news shows tend to go easy on big advertisers in their reporting. In the many tributes to journalist Tetsuya Chikushi, who died two weeks ago of lung cancer, no one mentioned that he was a heavy smoker. The dangers of cigarettes were never covered on his nightly TBS show,...

Longform

After the asset-price bubble crash of the early 1990s, employment at a Japanese company was no longer necessarily for life. As a result, a new generation is less willing to endure a toxic work culture —life’s too short, after all.
How Japan's youth are slowly changing the country's work ethic