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EDITORIALS
Jul 6, 2002

Unemployment insurance in peril

Rising unemployment is creating serious financial problems for the government, making it likely that jobless insurance premiums will be increased. In fact, Health, Labor and Welfare Minister Chikara Sakaguchi suggested the other day that the premium rate would be raised on an emergency basis, perhaps...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jul 6, 2002

Aussie cameraman's show highlights art of nature

Journalist Paul Murray was slightly thrown when his photographic teacher told him to forget using a macro lens. "He said the best photographers technically were Japanese, so I might as well give up before I started."
JAPAN
Jul 4, 2002

Tokyo fire prevention guru advocates household use of special safety system

Masanao Hirose, who oversees fire prevention at the Setagaya Fire Station, wants more households to deploy a special safety system set up by the Tokyo Fire Department.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 4, 2002

The Cyprus connection: How Milosevic evaded arms sanctions

NICOSIA, Cyprus -- On Dec. 27, 1998, a Yugoslav named Drakomir Stojkovic flew from Belgrade to Cyprus's Larnaca airport on a private jet carrying bags stuffed with 35 million deutsche marks -- worth roughly $17 million.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 3, 2002

Nissan lauds NPO-study scholarship recipients

Nissan Motor Co. has marked the completion of the fourth term of its Nissan-NPO Learning Scholarship Program and held an orientation seminar for the start of the fifth.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Jul 3, 2002

A photographer records the naked truth

On April 25, 1990, San Francisco photographer Jock Sturges' life changed forever. On that day, police raided his studio and office. They confiscated cameras, film, prints, computers and records -- on the suspicion that Sturges was involved in the production and distribution of child pornography.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 1, 2002

ATM-phobia marks banking leap in Laos

VIENTIANE -- It is only an ATM, but it might as well be an alien spacecraft that crash-landed in central Vientiane. People still do not know what to make of the country's first ATM, despite the fact that it was installed three months ago.
COMMUNITY
Jun 30, 2002

Sagae folk enjoying the fruits of their labor

Japan may be famously crazy about cherry blossoms, but the sakuranbo of Sagae City, Yamagata Prefecture, don't attract attention until long after their white flowers have fallen off. Sakuranbo are fruit cherries, and Sagae and neighboring Higashine cultivate more of them than anywhere else in the country....
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink
Jun 30, 2002

I brewed it my way

In 1994, within months of microbreweries being legalized in Japan, two began operation, followed by around 50 the next year. Although the general public took little notice back then, this regulatory rejig was to reshape my life.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jun 29, 2002

Cheering on Special Olympics, seeking volunteers

It is confusing to discover that Kayako Hosokawa has three offices in a building in Tokyo's Kasumigaseki. Two are neighbors -- "so convenient," she observes, nipping to and fro. The other is on the fifth floor, below. It is even more confusing to learn she has a fourth office, in Kumamoto, close to the...
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT
Jun 27, 2002

Japan's farmers start to go green

Hardly a week goes by without the emergence of some new scandal in the Japanese food industry. But whether it's the use of illegal additives or the mislabeling of imported meat as domestic, the outcome is the same: further breakdown in trust between consumers and the farmers and companies involved in...
JAPAN
Jun 26, 2002

Chronic fatigue linked to low serotonin

OSAKA — People who suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome, an illness characterized by debilitating tiredness, have decreased levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in their brains, according to recent findings by a joint research team.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 24, 2002

Shameful progress on reducing hunger

NEW YORK-- The World Food Summit in Rome underscored the severity of malnutrition around the world. More poignantly, it showed how slow the progress has been so far toward eliminating hunger and malnutrition. According to some estimates, 800 million people worldwide -- among them 300 million children...
JAPAN
Jun 24, 2002

Asian Conference on Religion and Peace gets under way in Indonesia

YOGYAKARTA, Indonesia — The sixth assembly of the Asian Conference on Religion and Peace (ACRP) opens today at the Sheraton Mustika Hotel in Yogyakarata, the ancient capital and cultural center of Indonesia.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jun 21, 2002

Big companies demanding better English

Takuya Suzuki has been taking the Test of English for International Communication exams twice a year since he joined electronic parts maker Sumida Corp. two years ago.
JAPAN
Jun 19, 2002

Youth sex on rise, as are serious infections

Sex education expert Atsuko Yoshida is alarmed by the increasingly decadent lifestyle of youth that has made them more susceptible than ever to sexually transmitted infections.
COMMENTARY / JAPAN IN THE GLOBAL ERA
Jun 17, 2002

How to avert the risk of war with China

LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- In the rolling green countryside of West Sussex in South England, there is an estate called Wilton Park. Some readers of this column may be familiar with the place and the institution it has become: "Wilton Park conferences" occur throughout the year bringing together politicians,...
COMMUNITY
Jun 16, 2002

The trickle down effect

Ever year around June, the high-altitude air current known as the jet stream lunges into the Himalayas, whose towering 8,000-meter peaks slice it into two branches that soar eastward over Asia toward the Pacific. Near Japan, they finally reunite and embrace between them a colossal mass of cold oceanic...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jun 16, 2002

Why the rain is mainly a pain

Your shoes make squishing sounds when you walk. After a couple of days' use, your bath towel begins to smell like it recently emerged from an Egyptian sarcophagus. Rain hats and scarves, umbrellas and waterproofing sprays proliferate. But no matter what you do, you still don't feel dry.
EDITORIALS
Jun 16, 2002

Thank God it's Monday

'A good name is better than precious ointment," according to the Bible. These days, that can mean more than just a good reputation, especially in business. It can mean a snappy title, too: something that will both stick in people's minds and make them smile.
COMMUNITY
Jun 16, 2002

A torrent of words

Ame may mean rain, but it's never been just rain in Japan; it's been dissected and categorized under a multitude of names that, sadly, few Japanese are in touch with anymore. Still, the fact that many people casually refer to Japan as ame no kuni (country of rain), where water perpetually seeps from...
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 15, 2002

No winners in Shenyang case

CAMBRIDGE, England -- Now that a little time has gone by, and peoples' attention is distracted by the World Cup, it is time for a little quiet thinking about the implications of the Shenyang incident. This was the incident in which Chinese police forcibly removed five North Koreans from the Japanese...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Jun 15, 2002

The coming imperial hooligan regime

A couple of weeks before the beginning of the World Cup soccer tournament, I went into the local grocery store on my island. Yes, this tiny island has a grocery store -- with four aisles! (sorry, no salad bar). We don't need more than one store, because only 800 people live here on Shiraishi Island....
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM MOSCOW
Jun 14, 2002

Moscow's bloody Sunday

MOSCOW -- The Bloody Sunday of June 9 took Moscow by surprise. Nobody expected a mob of soccer fans, upset by the performance of the national team, to launch a drunken rampage barely 100 meters away from President Vladimir Putin's Kremlin residence. The outburst of violence lasted for several hours,...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jun 13, 2002

NPO questions safety of electric cookers

A nonprofit organization's discovery in March that the radiation emitted by some portable induction-heating cooking stoves greatly exceed international limits has raised questions about the products' safety and what is being done about it.
COMMENTARY
Jun 13, 2002

Wounds of flawed partition remain raw

HONG KONG -- Once again, Indo-Pakistani relations are seen to be teetering on the brink of potentially calamitous conflict. Yet too little attention is being paid to the possible solutions that could diminish the sustained Indo-Pakistani cold war with its proven tendency to occasionally become hot.
COMMUNITY
Jun 13, 2002

Police shouldn't expect the worst from fans

The Japanese police force tried hard to create problems for itself last Friday night in Roppongi after the England vs. Argentina soccer match.

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