Search - people

 
 
EDITORIALS
Jun 1, 2006

From recovery to resilience

A devastating earthquake hit Indonesia over the weekend, even as the country is still struggling to recover from the magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami off Sumatra Island that killed about 168,000 people in the country in December 2004.
COMMENTARY
Jun 1, 2006

Will tottering governments hold back Europe's future?

LONDON -- Like a vampire rising from the grave, the issue of a new constitution for the European Union, which many people had assumed was dead and buried, has returned to haunt the corridors of power and government in the capitals of Europe.
BUSINESS
May 31, 2006

Unemployment marks third straight month at 4.1%

The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate stayed at 4.1 percent in April, marking its third month in a row at that level, the government said Tuesday.
BUSINESS
May 31, 2006

Abe-led panel stresses need for 'second chances'

The government needs to create a social system that gives a second chance to people who drop out of the job market and to entrepreneurs whose businesses have failed, a government panel said in an interim report released Tuesday.
COMMENTARY / World
May 29, 2006

English-only laws: a pain with little gain

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. -- "It gives the idea that any other language is excluded," stated Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain in reaction to a recently passed amendment that would make English the "national language of the United States."
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
May 28, 2006

Japan sleepwalks by design toward peace-renouncing poll

The Japanese people may soon be asked to make a momentous decision in a nationwide referendum. As I write this, the major political parties are at loggerheads over conditions under which that referendum will be conducted. Behind the closed doors of the Diet, but barely touched on in the media, this debate...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
May 26, 2006

Politics scaled with music

Matthew Herbert's new album "Scale" is easy to like. His signature arrangements of accessible house-inflected beats behind jazzy melodies are polished to a glossy sheen. Strings swoon. Horns sound lushly. Songs like the soulful "Moving like a Train" or "When We Are in Love" positively slink out of the...
COMMENTARY / World
May 25, 2006

Evidence portrays Russia as failed state

LONDON -- Have you read Russian President Vladimir Putin's 2006 State of the Nation message yet? The one he gave last week? You should.
EDITORIALS
May 24, 2006

To thwart self-destruction

Iraq's national unity government finally was inaugurated Saturday after the Parliament approved a list of 36 men and women appointed to the Cabinet of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The government is the first constitutionally based one since President Saddam Hussein's was toppled in 2003. With the...
JAPAN
May 23, 2006

Importer's rare tortoises a labor of love

Before he heads off to work, Masakazu Utsunomiya has a unique daily ritual of tender loving care -- he bathes and feeds the rare Burmese starred tortoises he keeps in his modest Tokyo apartment and ensures their tanks' temperature is just right.
COMMENTARY / World
May 23, 2006

Guard against obsolescence

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut -- As a college professor, I hear a lot of career concerns. As my students prepare to enter working lives that will last 50 years or more, practically all of them try to be futurists in choosing the skills in which to invest. If they pick an occupation that declines in the next...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WORDS TO LIVE BY
May 23, 2006

Yoshimasa Saito

Chef Yoshimasa Saito, 85, is the founder of Kitchen Country, a Hungarian restaurant in Tokyo's Jiyugaoka area. His goulash was once so famous that even celebrities were happy to stand in line for a place at one of his tables. Saito is a true optimist: Neither five years of hard labor in Siberia's notorious...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
May 21, 2006

Will Japan's 'positive influence' persist as it didn't before?

Well, the news is out, and it's good news.
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
May 21, 2006

Vision from the other side

It's not every day that you walk into a room to find yourself standing face-to-face with a skinned cadaver. It's the kind of thing that can change your whole day . . . or your whole life.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
May 20, 2006

Norma Diaz de Polski

Mention Argentina, and two stereotypes spring to mind: soccer and beef.
BUSINESS
May 19, 2006

Publishers find silver lining in coloring books for the elderly

For many people, coloring conjures up fond memories of childhood -- books scattered across the table, engrossed in one's work, clutching crayons until one's hands ached.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 19, 2006

A Japanese Jim Jarmusch

If the name Atsushi Funahashi doesn't ring any bells in the Japanese film industry, it's mainly because the domestic film scene had never been his primary concern.
EDITORIALS
May 19, 2006

Inequalities of pensions

In 1984, the government decided to rectify inequalities between the pension plan for company employees (kosei nenkin) and the one mainly for public servants (kyosai nenkin). Public servants are entitled to receive more benefits by paying smaller amounts of contributions than company employees.
JAPAN
May 18, 2006

Diet passes bill to take foreigners' prints, pics

A bill requiring fingerprinting and photographing of foreigners upon entry to Japan was passed Wednesday as a way to prevent terrorism.
COMMENTARY
May 12, 2006

Fixing the freedom to move

LONDON -- Recent marches in the United States by Latin Americans calling for some 12 million illegal immigrants to be given the right to reside and work in "the land of the free" are the most striking manifestation of a problem that affects every advanced country, although the issue is disguised in Japan....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
May 11, 2006

Grappling with gravity

At the Dairakudakan performance space in Kichijoji, a group of female performers move with the particular deliberateness of the butoh dance style. Their partners in the dance are snow-white noh masks, fully true to tradition but with one important modification: lurid red tongues extend and curl from...
EDITORIALS
May 9, 2006

'Enough is enough' in Sri Lanka

So said Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse after yet another round of violence that threatens to end the fragile peace in that country. His exasperation is understandable. The distrust between the two antagonists -- the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) -- is...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / VIEWS FROM THE STREET
May 9, 2006

What do you think about 'death penalty'?

Daniel Airport rep., 27 In principle, I agree. However, because of the way it's applied, I believe it shouldn't exist. Judges are human and they can make mistakes. To judge someone wrongly and execute them is too big a mistake to make.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
May 9, 2006

Local fury at Hardy perennial

Last month, as they have every year for decades, a small crowd of people gathered under fat cherry blossoms in Tokyo's Aoyama Park, carrying red lanterns, placards and peace symbols.
COMMENTARY / World
May 5, 2006

Chinese reoccupying Russia

VLADIVOSTOK, Russia -- 2006 is the Year of Russia in China; 2007 will be the Year of China in Russia -- if the current friendly relationship of the leaders of the two countries lasts that long. Friendly relations are not something that the peoples of the two countries support that much.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
May 5, 2006

Man from Wareika returns

During a break in a Tokyo recording session, Rico Rodriguez puts down his trombone to lark around on the roof with the teenage members of Oreskaband, the all-girl ska band he's been working with. That, at 72 years old, he is now old enough to be their grandfather doesn't even faze him.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK
May 3, 2006

Yearning for Canada's high north

I spent most of the latter part of March in Vancouver, British Columbia. I have friends and family there, and when the cherry and magnolia trees blossom and the mountains still gleam with snow, Vancouver is a very special place to be.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
May 2, 2006

How to kill a bill

On Oct. 12, 2005, the Tottori Prefectural Assembly approved Japan's first human rights ordinance, a local law forbidding and punishing racial discrimination.

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