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COMMENTARY / World
Aug 18, 2003

Choosing human security

The notion of "human security" has gradually but steadily gained greater international currency. Canada and Japan, especially under former Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy and the late former Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, respectively, were prominent early advocates of incorporating the...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Aug 16, 2003

Friends, the biggest of Japanese ships

This summer I opened an "omiyage" shop on our local beach in an attempt to help promote Shiraishi Island.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Aug 9, 2003

Sushma Omata

In the words of India's renowned musician Ravi Shanker: "The improvisatory nature of Indian classical music requires the artist before playing to take into consideration the setting, the time allowed for his recital, his mood and the feeling he discerns in the audience. Since Indian music is religious...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Aug 9, 2003

Debt-collectors push professionalism, not pain

Despite popular perceptions, profanities and threats are not screamed down the phone and the receiver doesn't end up getting slammed down.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 1, 2003

The transmutable Mr. Blair

LONDON -- Prime Minister Tony Blair is back in London after his whirlwind tour of Northeast Asia. For many of us the high point of his tour were the delightful moments at Tsinghua University in Beijing when, following a range of predictable questions that he answered with the usual bromides, he was asked...
JAPAN
Jul 31, 2003

Study hopes to dampen boozing

In a bid to reduce drinking in Japan, a health ministry team is conducting the country's first nationwide study on the hazards of alcohol consumption on health and human relations, researchers said Wednesday.
JAPAN
Jul 29, 2003

Social recluses age in isolation as help elusive

The average age of those who shun interaction with society and hole themselves up inside their homes stands at 26.7, with some 14 percent aged 35 or older, according to a health ministry study released Monday.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jul 27, 2003

Just go with the flow

You know the summer routine: The sun comes up, the mercury goes up . . . and the heat and humidity get you down, down, down.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 26, 2003

Bottom line for personal seals is they're obsolete, forgeable

Hideo Matsuzaki creates names that will last a lifetime, one deft knife stroke at a time.
JAPAN
Jul 26, 2003

Koizumi says no reforms means more suffering

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi defended his structural reform drive Friday, although he acknowledged the role it may have played in the record number of economy-related suicides in 2002.
JAPAN
Jul 25, 2003

Suicides above 30,000 for fifth consecutive year

The number of people who committed suicide in 2002 exceeded 30,000 for the fifth straight year, according to data released Thursday by the National Police Agency.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 25, 2003

Trucker to pay damages in installments

A former truck driver, his former employer and other concerns were handed a court order Thursday to pay 250 million yen in compensation to the parents of two infant sisters killed in a traffic accident he caused while driving drunk in 1999.
JAPAN
Jul 24, 2003

Rail staff taking passenger violence on chin

A drunken man gets up from his train seat and suddenly decks a railway employee, whose only offense was to wake him up at the end of the line.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle / ON THE BOOK TRAIL
Jul 24, 2003

"Fox," "Stravaganza: City of Masks"

"Fox," Matthew Sweeney, Bloomsbury; 2002; 176 pp. Every city has its ghosts. I don't mean spirits of the dead, I mean real people who might as well be invisible because no one takes notice of them.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 22, 2003

Net sidesteps ban on leaking personal info

After police took a junior high school student into custody earlier this month in the July 1 slaying of a 4-year-old boy in Nagasaki, a raft of information appeared on the Internet about the 12-year-old suspect -- in the face of a general ban on the media divulging data on minors involved in crimes....
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jul 20, 2003

Making sure your fragrance fits

There is always something sensual about the scent of the opposite sex -- or more particularly, the aroma he's wearing. On the streets, I pass by a man and often find myself glancing back, not because I've been struck by his looks but because I've caught a faint whiff of his cologne. The intoxicating...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 19, 2003

English class flexes the ear muscles

Many people in Japan blame the education system for their inability to communicate well in English, even though they have studied the language for years in school.
BUSINESS
Jul 19, 2003

Insurance policyholders warned to wise up, do their homework

In a bid to prevent frailty in the life insurance sector from potentially exploding into the political and banking scenes, the House of Councilors on Friday enacted legislation allowing troubled life insurers to lower their promised payouts to policyholders.
JAPAN
Jul 19, 2003

Disabled allowed to vote by proxy

Physically disabled people who cannot write by themselves will be allowed to let a proxy fill in their mail-in ballots under a law passed Friday by the Diet.
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Jul 18, 2003

Foreign banks excel in lending with measure of risk, realism

Reiko Kinoshita, senior vice president of Tokyo Star Bank's principal finance division, doesn't mince words. Neither she nor her clients have the time.
EDITORIALS
Jul 18, 2003

Time for responsibility in Hong Kong

The sense of crisis in Hong Kong continues to mount following the resignation this week of two top government officials. The departures come on the heels of massive demonstrations against Article 23, the proposed legislation designed to protect public security but which critics claim would erode civil...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 17, 2003

Japan must think outside the box if it hopes to get ahead: creativity guru

Japan needs to set up a "Ministry of Creativity" to think its way out of the economic slump it has endured for a decade, according to the world's leading authority in the field of creative and conceptual thinking.
JAPAN
Jul 16, 2003

2,200 disease carriers may have given blood

About 2,200 people who tested positive for hepatitis and other contagious diseases while donating blood in fiscal 2002 had previous blood donation records, according to the Japanese Red Cross Society.
EDITORIALS
Jul 15, 2003

Referendum risks in Taiwan

Taiwan has won respect the world over for its democracy. The island's political development has proven the naysayers wrong: Chinese culture and democracy are not incompatible. It is ironic then that one of the key issues today is the possibility that Taiwan is becoming "too democratic." The call for...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jul 12, 2003

'Luxury Travel Show' hits town, aiming for TV

Varun Sharma is tall, handsome, immaculately dressed, and can talk the hind leg off a donkey. He is also a truly gentle man in displaying genuine concern for the bell "boy" at the new Marunouchi Four Seasons, who turned out to be a young woman of such tiny, fragile proportions that he feared for her...
JAPAN
Jul 11, 2003

Sex change recognition law enacted

The Diet enacted a law Thursday to enable people with gender identity disorder to change, under certain conditions, the way their sex is listed in their family registries.

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