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Japan Times
JAPAN
Dec 12, 2012

Kan's plight encapsulates DPJ's plunge from grace since '09

Two days into the campaign for the Lower House election, former Prime Minister Naoto Kan made a stump speech last Thursday at Fuchu Station in his western Tokyo constituency.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Nov 2, 2012

Kamachiku: Redbrick storehouse as classic as the noodles

For a food with such a long and venerable history, udon gets surprisingly short shrift in Tokyo. Sure, it's not hard to find these long, chunky, white wheat noodles.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Aug 15, 2012

Output trumps energy-saving mood

In this summer of idled nuclear plants and energy shortages, corporate Japan is under duress.
COMMUNITY / How-tos / LIFELINES
Jun 19, 2012

Dealing with isolation and exclusion in Japan

Q: As mental health professionals dealing chiefly with native English-speakers in Tokyo, do you often have to deal with people who feel isolated and excluded in Japan, e.g. long-termers who have failed to "fit in" here, as in they lack Japanese friends, despite knowing the language, culture and so on?...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Jun 12, 2012

'Flyjin' feel vindicated, worry for those left in Japan

Although more than a year has passed since the magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku on March 11, 2011, Ivan Stout's memory of the moment when the Shinmarunouchi building in Tokyo's Chou Ward began to tremble is as vivid as ever.
COMMUNITY / Voices / HAVE YOUR SAY
Jun 5, 2012

'It's just because ... foreigners know best': readers' views

Some readers' views on John Spiri's May 1 Zeit Gist column, "It's just because . . . foreigners know best":
COMMENTARY / World
May 24, 2012

Beijing's North Korea policy only emboldens Pyongyang

Discussions in Beijing about North Korea are always frustrating. It's not so much due to the sharp divergence in U.S. and Chinese thinking about how to deal with Pyongyang; the two sides differ on many issues. No, the real problem, from our perspective, is the illogic of the Chinese position. Indeed,...
COMMUNITY / How-tos / LIFELINES
Apr 10, 2012

Can I sue a former employer for not paying toward my pension?

John has a question about the Japanese pension system. He writes: "I am a permanent, legal Japan resident, and worked full time for a foreign company in Tokyo for six years. I am now retired and the Japan pension office advised that this company did not enroll me in any government pension plan during...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Apr 8, 2012

Moving and shaking on Sakurajima

It looked like the kind of comfortably oily rag that makes a mechanic's job easier — the sort you find scrunched up in the corner of a garage soaked with tales of its long career, how it protected all manner of tools from rust, greased jamming gears ... and helped fix Mrs. Jones' "unfixable" carburettor...
JAPAN / EXPLAINER
Mar 27, 2012

Tohoku in rebuilding bubble

As Tohoku struggles to rebuild from last year's quake and tsunami, money continues to pour into the region in the form of central government subsidies for cleanup, repair and reconstruction.
COMMENTARY
Mar 21, 2012

Nearing the end of tyranny?

President Vladimir Putin in Russia, President Bashar Assad in Syria and President Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe are detested by many of their fellow countrymen who would like to see them overthrown and tried for human rights abuses. They depend on a close coterie of guards and aides who have to be kept happy....
Japan Times
LIFE
Mar 11, 2012

Young hopes bloom eternal

The first anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake is a time to commemorate the victims of that terrible tragedy. But it is also an opportunity to look to the future.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Jan 15, 2012

Call of the powder: sublime snow in Japan

There is nothing quite like the adrenaline rush of hurtling down a steep, untracked slope of knee-deep powder. It is an uncomplicated pleasure, pure and exhilarating; carving turns into the untouched snow and sending up white plumes in your wake.
COMMUNITY / Voices / HAVE YOUR SAY
Dec 27, 2011

Readers' views: Do foreigners deserve a fairer shake in Japan?

Some responses to the Nov. 6 Just Be Cause column by Debito Arudou headlined "For the sake of Japan's future, foreigners deserve a fair shake":
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 22, 2011

The dark legacy of North Korea's ruling elite

Satellite images of Asia at night are eerily beautiful, illuminated as they are by hundreds and thousands of bursts of light. That light is what civilization looks like from space. It's the glow of fluorescent bulbs in office buildings and warm lamps in homes and bright runways crisscrossing airports....
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Nov 20, 2011

Memories of Mount Takao

Sometimes in the Japanese autumn, when the days are still warm and the air is beginning to smell of persimmons and fallen leaves, my mind stumbles across a day nearly 20 years ago now, and I turn the memory over and over as I try to make sense of how the time since then has passed.
COMMENTARY
Nov 8, 2011

America's troubling support for oil-rich Islamist regimes

When Libya's interim government announced the "liberation" of the country Oct. 23, it declared that a system based on the Islamic Sharia, including polygamy, will replace the secular dictatorship that Moammar Gadhafi ran for 42 years.
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Sep 4, 2011

Actress's inheritance saga plays out like melodrama

Sometimes the components of a news story fit together so perfectly that you can't help but wonder how much of it was engineered by the press. Actress Hisako Manda, a former beauty queen who found success in recent years as a cover girl for magazines catering to women in their 50s, is currently at the...
Japan Times
LIFE
Aug 28, 2011

The best of his years . . .

This summer, my translator and I stood in Izumi Matsumoto's home-cum-office in Tokyo, where he had just been searching in vain for any original drawings from "Spring Wonder," which was, 27 years ago, the first manga serial he pitched to leading comics magazine Weekly Shonen Jump.
JAPAN
Aug 25, 2011

Nuclear refugees struggle to cope with uncertain future

Like thousands of other people, Miwa Kamoshita's life was turned upside down when the March 11 tsunami struck the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, leading her and her family to voluntarily evacuate their home in Iwaki, some 40 km south of the crippled power station.
EDITORIALS
Jul 16, 2011

Cutting the nuclear cord

Prime Minister Naoto Kan said Wednesday that he would like to turn Japan into a society that does not have to rely on nuclear power through a planned, stage-by-stage reduction of this reliance. His statement clearly points to a phasing out nuclear power over a long period — a great change in Japan's...
ENVIRONMENT / OUR PLANET EARTH
May 22, 2011

U.S. court victories show how to get rid of nuclear plants

Lawyer Tom Twomey knows far more than most of us about the importance of citizen participation in making energy policy. That's because Twomey has spent four decades keeping a watchful eye on electric power suppliers in New York — and he's learned that what we don't know can hurt us.
COMMENTARY
Apr 13, 2011

Nuclear disaster's impact

Japan's nuclear disaster highlights a contentious and still unresolved issue: how best to manage and dispose of highly radioactive used fuel from reactors that generate electricity.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Apr 3, 2011

Life's a breeze on far-out Miyakojima

Like tree rings, the islands of Okinawa contain cultures within cultures; ever more singular layers of age and time.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Mar 10, 2011

Zen psychology: Daisetz Suzuki remembered

Despite the gloomy global economy, the field of positive psychology is booming. Often described simplistically by journalists as "the science of happiness," it's actually a broad focus on our strengths and talents, virtues and peak experiences in daily living. The name for this specialty originated with...
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 12, 2011

The politics of an unanticipated revolution

DURHAM, N.C. — In setting himself ablaze following a humiliating encounter with the police, the university-educated Tunisian vegetable seller Mohamed Bouazizi triggered a wave of protests across the Arab world. Several Arab dictators who had held power for decades have already been ousted or forced...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Feb 6, 2011

Ailing Japan Inc. must combine tradition with a new world view

One of the clearest memories I have of my Los Angeles childhood revolves around a car. By the early 1950s, my parents had managed to eke their way into the middle class; and for Los Angelenos, nothing signified that social status more than the automobile. For my dad, the symbol of this par excellence...
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design
Jan 30, 2011

Japan's nail-art pioneer recalls the early years

Sachiko Nakasone, Japan's pioneer nail technician and principal of NSJ Nail Academy in Tokyo, first recalls seeing signs for nail salons in 1972 when she visited Long Beach, California, as a hair stylist with a Japanese advertising agency.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Jan 16, 2011

A dream comes true with the blues

My last great wildlife adventure of 2010 began in darkness to the sound of waves crashing on an idyllic beach.
JAPAN
Jan 1, 2011

Kan's foreign policy plate full, waiting to be attacked

The foreign policy agenda of Prime Minister Naoto Kan and his Democratic Party of Japan-led government in 2011 is stacked with pressing bilateral diplomatic issues with the United States and China, as well as broader, strategic goals, including curbing global warming and promoting regional free trade....

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