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Features
Feb 27, 2005

Judges 'on bended knee'

For the 21 years of his life as a judge, Akira Rokusha lived a closeted existence. From his home in an official residence alongside fellow judges and other courthouse employees, he was taken to the court in a special minibus, and he spent his days off reading and reviewing material related to his cases....
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Feb 26, 2005

The woes of the misunderstood 'gaijin'

I've been a nonnative speaker of Japanese for 12 years now. I'll go weeks without speaking a word of English, since where I live, I'm the only "gaijin." But after several years of consistent hard work, I have trained the 700 people on my island to understand my gaijin Japanese. We are almost at the point...
Japan Times
Features / WEEK 3
Feb 20, 2005

Sit down and be counted!

One chilly Friday morning last month, high-school teacher Noriyuki Ishida had probably the most stressful experience of his 35-year career.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / NATURE TRAVEL
Feb 20, 2005

There's big, and Hoover Dam big

Take 4,360 cubic meters of concrete (enough to pave a single-lane highway from San Francisco to New York), add 21,000 workers (but deduct an average of 50 a day due to injury or death), stir in 5 million, 8-cubic-meter buckets of cement and 950 km of steel piping, then garnish the lot with a dog that...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Feb 20, 2005

Ah-choo! Picked up an allergy to the hay-fever industry

Last week the pharmaceutical company Riken announced that it was developing a new desensitivity treatment for serious allergy sufferers. The treatment program would entail fifty or so injections over a three-year period, which is quite a reduction in time. I should know. I received biweekly or monthly...
COMMENTARY
Feb 17, 2005

Racist banner looks frayed

Understanding Japan and the Japanese was never meant to be easy. This is especially true for the Japanese attitude to foreigners -- at times exclusivist and at other times extremely open. There is an answer to the seeming contradiction, but it requires outsiders to accept that the Japanese might have...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Feb 16, 2005

Sisters gonna work it out

There was a time when radio in the United States was full of surprises -- a time when catchy, clever tunes were just a turn of the dial away. Pop music carried less baggage then, before marketing and demographics moved in and warped station programming into socio-economic formulas.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Feb 13, 2005

Keeping it all in the community

Ten years ago a loosely knit group of friends started hanging out on a regular basis at a local community center in East L.A. They had no money (and still don't by any reckoning), but they cared about their community, and counted on it for inspiration and support. The cultural diversity of East L.A....
EDITORIALS
Feb 13, 2005

Dead man moonwalking

Pity Michael Jackson. Of course, that's after checking off a long list of other justifiable reactions to the sad, clown-like figure whose trial on child molestation and other charges is now getting under way in California with all the solemnity of a circus. Amazement, impatience, sympathy, repugnance,...
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Feb 10, 2005

Ramen food courts seek to slake slurping throngs

Ramen eateries in Tokyo have started banding together in food court-style complexes in response to red-hot competition.
EDITORIALS
Feb 10, 2005

More warnings of bird flu

Rising numbers of cases of avian flu in Asia are fueling fears of a global outbreak. The disease appears to be resurfacing in the region, and health officials worry that they do not have the tools to fight it. A mutation that allows the disease to pass from person to person could be the spark that sets...
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 9, 2005

Howard Baker will be missed

The image of ambassadors has changed greatly over the years. Until the mid-20th century, ambassadors were said to be "dwellers among the clouds" -- a Japanese phrase for the nobility. This metaphor showed what ordinary people thought of nobles. To the commoners busy with their daily work, the privileged...
EDITORIALS
Feb 8, 2005

Concern over the first vCJD case

Japan last week confirmed its first case of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human version of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). The disease is said to spread through the consumption of beef products from cows infected with BSE. In Britain, which reported a high...
Japan Times
Features
Feb 6, 2005

Calls for change as WHS status threatens one of Japan's gems

The breathtaking mountain landscape of the Kii Peninsula, and its ancient temples, monasteries and shrines have captivated the Japanese people for more than 1,000 years.
COMMENTARY
Jan 31, 2005

Zhao Ziyang: the death of a nonperson

HONG KONG -- While it seems unlikely that the death of China's former leader Zhao Ziyang will provoke mass unrest, the way in which it is being handled indicates the profound official insecurity still aroused by the mass unrest in 1989.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 31, 2005

Fires of hope for the leprosy-afflicted

There is a disease that is completely curable. It is phenomenally hard to contract. If caught early, it has little to no effect on those who have been touched by it. Yet, mention of this disease fills people with more dread, with more gut-level loathing, than any other. The disease is leprosy. It is...
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 30, 2005

Neglect led to higher Indian casualty toll

MADRAS, India -- In India, very few people had heard the word tsunami, let alone understood what these waves could do. Until Sunday, Dec. 26, hardly anybody had the vaguest inclination of the destructive ability of the sea.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jan 30, 2005

McLaughlin: a mind-set for music

Guitarist John McLaughlin burst onto the jazz scene in the 1960s as a member of Miles Davis' cutting-edge electric groups. On famed works like "In a Silent Way," "Bitches' Brew" and "Jack Johnson," his guitar work very much helped define Miles' sound. Then in the early '70s, his own jazz-rock fusion...
Japan Times
Features
Jan 30, 2005

'Curiosity' at the core of days packed with lots to chew on

Atsuko Tanuma's day begins at 5 a.m. It's a routine she has followed for 17 years, since she started preparing lunch-boxes for her first son when he began kindergarten at the age of 4.
JAPAN
Jan 29, 2005

Mondays see most suicides; men tend to pick 5 a.m., women noon

Mondays had the most suicides in Japan in 2003, with the most common hour being around 5 a.m. for men and around noon for women, an analysis by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare showed Friday.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Jan 29, 2005

Margaret Powell

Headquartered in Reading, England, GAP Activity Projects is a nonprofit organization that arranges gap year activities for young people. In the U.K., the gap year is offered between high school and university. GAP was originated in 1972 by a teacher who knew that some students were eager for overseas...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Jan 29, 2005

Take this job and love it

Maybe it was Benjamin Disraeli or maybe it was Mark Twain or maybe it was me who said, "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics . . . followed by Japanese financial data."
JAPAN
Jan 27, 2005

Police bust 10 billion yen phone fraud ring

Police arrested more than 10 people Wednesday, including mobsters, former loan sharks and youths, on suspicion of perpetrating a series of remittance frauds nationwide.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 26, 2005

Gosling plays it straight

He's not "Ryan-san" but "Gos-sama" to his Japanese fans, and the tall, lanky 25-year-old from Canada is fast on his way to becoming the next Hollywood sensation ("the next River Phoenix!" gush the Japanese movie magazines). However, in person, Ryan Gosling is an unassuming, laid-back kind of guy who...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jan 26, 2005

Sub Pop's second coming

In the late '80s and early '90s, Seattle and its music scene became the center of the pop culture universe. Sub Pop, the small label founded by sometime journalist Bruce Pavitt and nurtured with his partner Jonathan Poneman was its primary documenter.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Jan 25, 2005

Japan's enemy within

Riding home from school on the crowded Tokyo underground recently one day, 12-year-old Kim says she felt something hit the back of her head. When she checked what it was, her hand came away covered in saliva spat by a middle-aged male passenger. As he was getting off, the man said: "Get back to your...
JAPAN
Jan 19, 2005

Despite rash of counterfeiting, bank-note transition to take a year

The debut of new currency with anticounterfeit technology appears to have prompted people turning out fake old bank notes to rush to use them, but it will probably take about a year before all the old money is taken out of circulation.
Japan Times
JAPAN / 10 YEARS AFTER
Jan 18, 2005

City's new face conceals unhealed wounds, a sense of communities lost

KOBE -- A decade after the massive Kobe earthquake, there remains little visible trace of the damage to this port city.

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