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Japan Times
BASEBALL
Mar 10, 2017

Buck Martinez looks back on inaugural WBC, remains pleased with global growth of game

Former Team USA skipper Buck Martinez said he recalls everything from the game in Anaheim, California, where his team and manager Sadaharu Oh's Japan squad squared off in the second round of the inaugural World Baseball Classic in 2006.
JAPAN
Mar 9, 2017

Japan will deliver big during Tokyo 2020 Cultural Olympiad, London Games official says

Japan's celebration of culture leading up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics will "deliver something inspiring for the people of Japan and the whole world," according to London 2012 Cultural Olympiad Director Ruth Mackenzie.
Japan Times
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Mar 6, 2017

In defense of the older Japanese man (because someone's got to do it)

Men over 35 — better known as 'ojisan' or the more derogatory 'ossan' — are lumped together in a cold, lonely place where they have little choice but to huddle together for warmth.
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / ON: DESIGN
Mar 4, 2017

Welcome to the design fold

This month celebrates the art of folding with a selection of products that can be transformed by just a few bends, creases and tucks.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink
Mar 3, 2017

Asia's top pastry chef Kazutoshi Narita on what inspires his creations

Over the past three decades, master patissier Kazutoshi Narita has worked in half a dozen countries alongside some of the world's most acclaimed chefs.
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Mar 1, 2017

Toyota Mirai's fuel cell technology must overcome ghosts of hydrogen's past

Taxi driver Theo Ellis, the first person in Europe to drive Toyota Motor Corp.'s hydrogen-powered Mirai sedan for business, loves telling passengers about the technology that emits nothing but water.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Feb 26, 2017

What's in a name? Just ask Cairophenomenons

When a band changes its name, it sometimes signifies a switch in artistic direction. For indie band Cairophenomenons — previously known as Cairo — the decision was far more practical, even if the new moniker is a bit of a mouthful.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 25, 2017

Polish film director Andrzej Wajda represented the voice and conscience of a nation

"I stood here just after the end of the war," Polish film director Andrzej Wajda said. "I was only 19 years old. The entire area was flattened, just rubble. The Stare Miasto (Old Town) was one big gaping pit that I stared into."
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / BACKSTREET STORIES
Feb 25, 2017

East of Meiji Shrine, west of Jingu Stadium

It's a brisk February day, with a neoprene blue and cloudless sky. I alight at Harajuku Station and head northeast, threading narrow alleyways filled with cute guys and kawaii gals browsing boutiques.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Feb 11, 2017

Crafts and coral of an embattled coast

A little north of the massive Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, a slew of scattered residential settlements and visitor sites are pincered between the Torii Station Army Base and an ammunition storage facility situated in Yomitan, a region of the southern mainland, where a massive U.S. amphibious landing took...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 8, 2017

Punk: How cinema ignored something so loud

Once upon a time, Hollywood was good at co-opting and selling youth culture. When rock 'n' roll and biker gangs came along in the 1950s, the studios came up with generational totems like "Blackboard Jungle" and "The Wild Ones." Beatlemania spawned "A Hard Days Night" and "Yellow Submarine," while the...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books / ESSENTIAL READING FOR JAPANOPHILES
Feb 4, 2017

'The Sound of Waves' stands alone in the sea of Yukio Mishima's works

"The Sound of Waves" is a typical boy-meets-girl story. Shinji is a poor fisherman on Uta-jima, a small island in Ise Bay. Hatsue left the island as a young girl to train to be a pearl diver. When she returns, now a young woman, Shinji falls for her but finds he has a rival in the rich and powerful Yasuo....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jan 21, 2017

The triumphant second coming of Endo's 'Silence'

Martin Scorsese's adaptation of "Silence," Shusaku Endo's tale of Catholic missionaries suffering brutal repression in 17th-century Japan, has met with mixed reviews. Some have found it ponderously overlong and, for those unfamiliar with Japanese history, baffling in context. It is, in fact, not a minute...
Reader Mail
Jan 20, 2017

The beauty of country living

Regarding the story "Country life holds growing appeal for young people" in the Jan. 4 edition, the author has described an extraordinary community. It's an incredible story, especially that of a Tokyo University graduate who bravely took the less-trodden path by giving up an offer of an advertising...
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Jan 20, 2017

Facebook's Zuckerberg suing to gain rights to Kauai hideaway over undocumented heirs

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has launched a raft of lawsuits that could see the U.S. billionaire secure full ownership of his island hideaway from local Hawaiian families who retain rights over the land dating back generations.
BUSINESS / DAVOS SPECIAL 2017
Jan 17, 2017

UNESCO World Heritage sites in Japan

Japan had its first World Heritage sites registered in 1993 when UNESCO registered Buddhist monuments in the Horyuji Temple area, Himeji Castle, Yakushima Island and the Shirakami-Sanchi beech tree forest.
CULTURE / Film
Jan 11, 2017

'The Neon Demon': Demonically arty — in a good way

With "The Neon Demon," director Nicolas Winding Refn seems to have come to the end of a trilogy that began with "Drive" (2011) and continued through "Only God Forgives" (2013). The idea seems to be to take genre-flick styles — car action, revenge and horror — and unravel them to the point where they...
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Jan 7, 2017

Heavy metal in Japan: Love of craft runs deep

Although 2017 is the Year of the Fire Rooster, fire is not the only element destined to influence the next 12 months. Each of the 12 Chinese zodiac years is governed by one of five elements: wood, fire, earth, water and metal, resulting in 2017 taking the element of fire. According to the Five Elements...
JAPAN / GEARING UP FOR THE GAMES,GEARING UP FOR THE GAMES
Jan 4, 2017

Japan's rising sports stars look to raise the bar at Tokyo 2020 Olympics

Setting new records, Japan's Olympians managed to haul in a very respectable 38 medals at the 2012 London Games and 41 last year in Rio de Janeiro. Their efforts are certainly something for the nation's up-and-coming young athletes to duplicate or even surpass, as there are many potential stars out there who could become household names by the time Tokyo hosts the Olympics about 3u00bd years from now.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Dec 31, 2016

Buried alive in the shadow of a Kyushu volcano

"Is the temperature alright for you ma'am?" my Japanese attendant asks in a polished U.S. accent as he cheerfully heaps another pile of hot sand on my torso.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Dec 31, 2016

Misuzu Kaneko: A deeper empathy for the natural world

In her brief life, Japanese poet Misuzu Kaneko (1903-1930) produced a body of work with themes that are every bit as relevant today as when she first put pen to paper nearly 100 years ago. Ostensibly a writer of poems for children, Kaneko's work reveals a deep respect for the environment and an awareness...
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Dec 29, 2016

First sunrise of the year brings luck

The sight of a sunrise is familiar to early risers. On New Year's Day the experience takes on a more special meaning — legend has it the sun goddess Amaterasu created this country after all.
LIFE / Lifestyle
Dec 24, 2016

Japan's first Christmas

In a letter home to Portuguese brethren, Jesuit missionary Pedro de Alcacova writes of singing a Mass to Japanese believers in 1552: "Our voices weren't good," he recalls, "still the Christian believers rejoiced."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 21, 2016

Finding courage and hope in 2016

The Year of the Monkey is drawing to a close. Despite the events in the real world, this year at least brought us some soulful films. Perhaps the filmmakers wanted to prepare us for the impending yuckiness of future reality. Still, my picks for the best films of the year intriguingly combined sweetness...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 20, 2016

Raku: A traditional contemporary art form

At the opening of "The Cosmos in a Tea Bowl: Transmitting a Secret Art Across Generations of the Raku Family" at The National Museum of Modern Art, in Kyoto, the current head of the Raku family, Kichizaemon XV (b. 1949), explained that the event would be "an unprecedented and once-in-a-lifetime exhibition...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 20, 2016

A Museum Journey: Traveling the Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido through Hiroshige's Prints

Dec. 23-April 2
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 13, 2016

Tokyo: photogenic to its very core

Care to take a guess what the new exhibition "Tokyo, Tokyo and Tokyo" at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum is about? In fact there are two exhibitions with the same name running concurrently, so it's "Tokyo, Tokyo and Tokyo" and "Tokyo, Tokyo and Tokyo."

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