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Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Aug 24, 2019

'Perfume: In Search of Your Signature Scent': Up the distinguished nose of an olfactory detective

Neil Chapman's passion for scents has taken him all over the world and incited him to write 'Perfume,' a 'scent atlas' that takes the form of a gorgeous 288-page guidebook.
COMMUNITY / Voices / FOREIGN AGENDA
May 12, 2019

Memoirs from a Japanese internet cafe

While some people pine for traditions from Japan's ancient past, it might actually be the more modern things that we'll truly miss.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 7, 2019

Gustav Klimt: Behind all that glitters

Decorative gold surfaces and images of radiant women define the work of Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) for many people. The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum's current exhibition, however, highlights lesser-known aspects of the Austrian artist's career, offering more insight into the man behind the works.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 27, 2019

Kengo Kora and the perfect period drama sword fight

'Game of Thrones" star Sean Bean is well-known for dying in almost everything he stars in. If you had to find a Japanese equivalent, though, it would certainly be Kengo Kora.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHY DID YOU LEAVE JAPAN?
Mar 23, 2019

Fumi Nagasaka: When Japan is neither in nor out of the picture

For Fumi Nagasaka, photography was born from making friends.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 28, 2018

Shinzo Fukuhara: Shiseido's patron of beauty

As an artist, Shinzo Fukuhara may not be a household name, but his production of a photography magazine, founding of the Shiseido Gallery and writings on aesthetics were seminal to the development of art photography in Japan.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink
Jul 21, 2018

Kitchens of longevity: The culinary secrets of age-old Okinawa

Okinawa is one of the world's “Blue Zones,” areas where people live particularly long and healthy lives. Observing the processes and procedures behind Okinawan yakuzen medicinal cooking offers some delicious hints.
Japan Times
WORLD
Jul 21, 2018

Missouri boat accident kills 17, including nine from one family

Nine members of the same family were among 17 people killed when a "duck boat" sank during a storm on Thursday on a Missouri lake in one of the deadliest U.S. tourist tragedies in years.
JAPAN / History / Defining the Heisei Era
Jun 23, 2018

Defining the Heisei Era: Japan experiences a hangover

The Japan Times presents the second installment of a monthly 12-part series that looks back at the leading issues of the past three decades.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Mar 31, 2018

'Territory of Light' is a timely translation that sheds light on Japan's marginalized

Acclaimed novelist Yuko Tsushima spent her lifetime reflecting light on the shadowed voices in Japan, inspired by her own experiences as a single mother facing the censure of a traditionally patriarchal society. In her later years, Tsushima explored the marginalized in Japanese history, writing from...
Japan Times
MORE SPORTS / ICE TIME
Feb 1, 2018

Return to roots helps Akane Hosoyamada realize an Olympic dream

"She is the one I trust the most."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 4, 2018

A cloven landscape, a cloven tree, a cloven self

On a recent trip to Tohoku, photographer Naoya Hatakeyama took a picture of a tree. It wasn't a particularly remarkable tree, but it caught his attention all the same.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Sep 28, 2017

Festival/Tokyo director Sachio Ichimura looks to a new generation

At the end of his speech in July announcing details of this year's Festival/Tokyo running from Sept. 30 to Nov. 12 mainly at venues around Ikebukuro, its director, Sachio Ichimura, dropped a bombshell.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHY DID YOU LEAVE JAPAN?
Jul 22, 2017

Yasuhiko Tsuchida: Bringing a hint of Japan to Venetian glass art

On a sweltering summer day in Venice, the temperature in Yasuhiko Tsuchida's glass-making atelier feels at least 10 degrees hotter than it is outside. Men roast their faces against groaning furnaces, shirts drenched with sweat, pulling clumps of luminous molten glass from the fire as the glass artist...
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design
Jul 9, 2017

Tokyo filling the shoes of European artisans

While Yohei Fukuda was learning the art of shoemaking in London in the early 2000s he applied to work at John Lobb, one of the oldest and most prestigious footwear firms in the world. He was offered a position, but was asked if he would accept payment in shoes — not money. Somewhat taken aback, Fukuda...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / How-tos / LIFELINES
Jul 9, 2017

Thank you, Jean Pearce, for helping us get things done in Japan

If the U.S. had Ann Landers and Dear Abby, and Britain had Marge Proops, then Japan had Jean Pearce — someone who transcended the title of 'columnist' and became a media icon for generations of readers.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 25, 2016

Will Hikaru Utada's new album 'Fantome' change the rules of modern J-pop?

'As trends fade into the cultural rearview mirror, Hikaru Utada is a prime candidate to bring back what J-pop has lost in her absence: relatability.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Dec 5, 2015

Hunter and hunted: Where are they now?

The mutilations are frightful — dog, cat, rabbit and pigeon corpses missing heads, tails, limbs, ears. Weekly Playboy magazine reports nearly 40 sightings in the past four months in the Kanto region alone. Who's out there doing these things? With what thoughts in mind?
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 1, 2015

James Bond is the U.K.'s greatest intelligence asset

James Bond and his fellow fictional British operatives allow U.K. intelligence to project an image that goes well beyond the niggling issues of reality.
Japan Times
JAPAN / TELLING LIVES
Sep 4, 2015

Patrick Harlan, an American who can make the Japanese giggle

Japan's entertainment business is a come and go affair. Hundreds of local and foreign talents have entered the spotlight with a joke or two, only to vanish a year or two later when their gags ran out of chuckle.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / 20 QUESTIONS
Aug 22, 2015

Chie Suzuki: 'I'm always thinking about what to make next'

Wooden clog designer on ukiyo-e, cats and sushi
Japan Times
JAPAN
Aug 20, 2015

English-immersion share house offers cultural experience

On any given weekday some 15 to 20 residents of a four-story apartment building in the Tokyo suburb of Fuchu converge in the Scandinavian-style cafe-lounge at around 9 p.m. to converse in English.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Society
Aug 14, 2015

Almost 30% of young people don't want to work for a company, survey finds

A survey revealed Thursday that some young people in Japan maintain an unenthusiastic and rather cool attitude toward employment.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jul 25, 2015

Will 'neurotic' Japan go postcapitalist?

Is Japan on the threshold of postcapitalism? If it is, as Morris Berman suggests in "Neurotic Beauty: An Outsiders Look at Japan," Prime Minister Shinzo Abe doesn't seem to have received the memo.
Japan Times
MORE SPORTS
May 29, 2015

Prefontaine's legacy still growing 40 years after death

'I'm not afraid of losing. But if I do, I want it to be a good race. I'm an artist, a performer. I want people to appreciate the way I run.' — Steve Prefontaine
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Feb 14, 2015

The three-cornered world of Glenn Gould and Natsume Soseki

Two years after it was published, a copy of Natsume Soseki's novella 'The Three-Cornered World' was placed in the hands of one of the world's most celebrated pianists, Glenn Gould.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 1, 2015

Son of God: 'There is little to no poetic license taken here'

Just in time to be too late for Christmas is "Son of God," Hollywood's latest attempt to reboot the Jesus franchise. Director Christopher Spencer tries to give a more family-friendly version of the life of Jesus than the torture-porn brutality of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 24, 2014

Top 10 films of 2014: in search of originality

The longer you go on watching and writing about film, the more you start to feel like one of those jaded vampires in Jim Jarmusch's "Only Lovers Left Alive." It's as though art's power to surprise and amaze you is nowhere near what it was when you were fresh to it. "Gone Girl" and "Interstellar" were...
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 12, 2014

How vodka limits hastened the USSR's demise

When the Soviet Union finally disintegrated at the end of 1991, Boris Yeltsin, the new Russian leader, decided not to repeat Mikhail Gorbachev's error of restricting access to vodka. Some say it was Gorbachev's sober way of life — and his attempt to impose it on his countrymen — that makes Russians dislike him in retrospect.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jul 3, 2014

Nothing is ordinary for Leandro Erlich

'Swimming pools, staircases and elevators are ordinary places that we never question, as we think that we know about them already. But is that true? Do we really know them?' — Leandro Erlich.

Longform

A small shrine perched atop rocks braves the waves hitting the shoreline during a storm in Shimoda, Shizuoka Prefecture. The area is under threat of a possible 31-meter-high tsunami if an earthquake strikes the nearby Nankai Trough.
If the 'Big One' hits, this city could face a 31-meter-high tsunami