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BASEBALL / Japanese Baseball
Oct 24, 2010

Nomo's legacy should land him in Hall of Fame

Fourth in a four-part series
Japan Times
LIFE
Oct 24, 2010

Some participants' hopes for COP10

The Japan Times asked delegates and other COP10 participants what their top priorities are at the conference. Many mentioned an Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) Protocol that is currently the subject of intense negotiations. This would determine how companies and researchers gain access to and distribute...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Oct 24, 2010

Nibutani, Hokkaido: Travel, hospitality and the Ainu identity

Ainu are the indigenous people of Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands and much of Sakhalin. However, their culture in Hokkaido, dating back to the 13th century, was decimated after Japanese settlers began flocking to the huge northern island in the 1800s.
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 23, 2010

Poverty still pervades booming South Asia

WASHINGTON — South Asia presents a depressing paradox. It is among the fastest growing regions in the world, but it is also home to the largest concentration of people living in debilitating poverty, conflict and human misery. While South Asia is far more developed than Sub-Saharan Africa, and India...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Oct 22, 2010

Is Tokyo staging the next major theater festival?

Festival/Tokyo, which launched last year with two sets of events in spring and autumn, is in a bid to join the ranks of the world's top-flight theater festivals — such as Edinburgh's annual spectacular in Scotland, Avignon's in the South of France and Adelaide's in South Australia. The question is,...
COMMENTARY
Oct 22, 2010

Are China and Japan on a collision course?

LOS ANGELES — The people of China and Japan deserve better leadership at the top than they have been getting. But better leadership is not immediately in prospect for either ancient nation. That means relations between the two giant economies will probably get worse, when improvement is urgently needed...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Oct 22, 2010

Here be Vampires

V ampire Weekend bassist Chris Baio exudes a happy demeanor, albeit a slightly weary one. Weary thanks to an unyielding touring schedule that finds him traveling to San Diego midway through an extensive tour of the United States; happy because there can be no reservation that his band have dominated...
EDITORIALS
Oct 21, 2010

On track to succeed Mr. Hu Jintao

Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping was appointed vice chairman of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Military Commission during the Fifth Plenary Session of the 17th CCP's Central Committee — a four-day event which ended on Monday. The appointment set the 57-year-old Mr. Xi, who now holds the No....
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 21, 2010

Return of a maverick

HONG KONG — On the way to the airport in early 1990, I saw a strange face among the profusion and confusion of election posters. Not a European grandee, or indigenous Indian, or mestizo, or mulatto. It was more like Chinese, but surely not in this heart of Latin America.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Oct 19, 2010

Focus more on 'satoyama': expert

To stop ecosystem degradation in farmland and coastal areas, bureaucrats and scientists must join hands to design new policies that can improve the situation, warns a United Nations official who has worked closely on the issue in Japan.
BASEBALL / HIT AND RUN
Oct 19, 2010

Playoff schedule denies NPB center stage

Major League Baseball, as it has done throughout its playoffs, showcased the best of the best over the weekend.
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Oct 17, 2010

Aeon 'digging grave' for temple funerals

Last year, a friend who lives in Tokyo received a letter from the Buddhist temple where her family grave is located. The temple is in a town in Gunma Prefecture, and while none of her relatives live there any more, they visit the grave for the proper seasonal observances.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Oct 16, 2010

Professor finds meaning in silence

In Japanese there's a word for it, that prolonged silence that cuts into a conversation, bringing discomfort and interrupting flow: shiin. We've all experienced that dead-air tension, but surprisingly there are different levels of comfort with silence, depending on the language being spoken.
JAPAN / U.S. FORCES IN JAPAN
Oct 14, 2010

Bases: Transplanted slices of Americana

Edward Papazian, an American, visits the U.S. Navy bases at Yokosuka and Atsugi, both in Kanagawa Prefecture, once every two or three months, escorted by a former navy friend.
JAPAN / U.S. FORCES IN JAPAN
Oct 14, 2010

Suddenly, U.S. alliance is back in vogue

Only a few months ago, the Japan-U.S. military alliance — considered by both nations as the "cornerstone" of peace and security in the Asia-Pacific region — was in crisis.
EDITORIALS
Oct 13, 2010

Sharper prod to quit smoking

The tobacco tax was raised by ¥3.5 per cigarette on Oct. 1, raising the price of a pack of 20 cigarettes by ¥110-¥140 to ¥410-¥440. This record tobacco price hike means ¥40,000 more spending a year for a person who smokes one pack a day. But this offers a good chance to quit smoking for smokers...
Japan Times
LIFE
Oct 10, 2010

Standing up for the right to sit down in public

A quick story about me, public seating and Japan: It's 1994. I've been in Tokyo less than a week and this is my first time in Shinjuku. Lunchtime comes and my student thriftiness and Australian love of the outdoors beget a plan: I'll grab something at a department-store food counter and eat it on a seat...
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Oct 7, 2010

World's top chefs forage locally for inspiration

Earlier this September, chef Yoshihiro Narisawa of the Michelin-starred restaurant Les Creations de Narisawa, in the Aoyama district of Tokyo, joined 15 of the world's top chefs to make dinner in Levi, Lapland, 170 km above the Arctic Circle.
Japan Times
JAPAN / EXPLAINER
Oct 5, 2010

Homeopathy: cure or placebo?

Homeopathy recently came under the spotlight after Science Council of Japan President Ichiro Kanazawa urged medical workers to refrain from using the more than 200-year-old form of alternative medicine, calling it "ignorance of science" and "absurd."
COMMUNITY / Issues / JUST BE CAUSE
Oct 5, 2010

Census blind to Japan's true diversity

It's that time of the decade again. By now, all households in Japan should have received and submitted Japan's National Census (kokusei chosa), a survey taken every five years expressly to assist in policymaking, drawing up electoral districts and other matters of taxation and representation. This of...
Japan Times
Events / WHERE IT'S AT
Oct 5, 2010

Event raises ¥3.4 million for Pakistan flood victims

About 350 people gathered for a charity event last week in Tokyo to raise funds to support victims of Pakistan's devastating floods this summer.
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 3, 2010

The resistance to Russia's political order

MOSCOW — Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's decision to fire Moscow's long-entrenched mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, is the most decisive move of his presidency. Is it really part of his drive to modernize Russia, or part of an emerging power play with Moscow's real strong man, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin?...
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK
Oct 3, 2010

A place in the woods for the world to gather

Construction of the Afan Nature Centre here in our woods outside Kurohime in the Nagano Prefecture hills is complete and the keys have been handed over to us. The beautiful building is the result of a decade of wishing, three years of planning, and a year of onsite building.
CULTURE / Books
Oct 3, 2010

Mao's famine was no dinner party

There are many books on the Great Leap Forward (GLF) that detail the horrific suffering inflicted on the Chinese people, and the instigating role of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is well known, so why yet another?
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Oct 2, 2010

Living green, Venetia truly is at home in Kyoto

Venetia Stanley-Smith Kajiyama, or Venetia to her many fans, personifies natural, country living in her popular NHK program "Neko no Shippo, Kaeru no Te," but her first two months in Tokyo exemplified neon lights and city swing as a go-go dancer at a Shinjuku disco.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Oct 1, 2010

De De Mouse sets an electronic trap

"I am a musician, not a celebrity," says the shy fop when asked about the bumbled between-song banter in his otherwise triumphant set that finished just moments earlier at a music festival. Facing in toward his backing band, rather than outward to the crowd, the shy fop had buried his head in a bank...
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 29, 2010

Seven more years of hard economic times?

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Much of the talk emerging from the August 2010 Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, attended by many of the world's central bankers and economists, has been about a paper presented there that gave a dire long-run assessment of the future of the world's economies.

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