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Japan Times
LIFE / Digital
Jun 25, 2008

Japanese Facebook takes Model T approach

Late last month, as part of a rare work-vacation trip to Asia, Mark Zuckerberg made a quick stop in Tokyo to announce the launch of Facebook Japan.
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / IGADGET
Jun 25, 2008

Lighting's on the wall for niche products this summer

Game on Playing games is serious business, as any boy who never grew up will tell you in virulent tones. Your basic off-the-shelf computer these days can cope with the entire Microsoft Office suite without raising a sweat. But try running any resource-hungry game on the same machine and your workhorse...
JAPAN
Jun 24, 2008

Fukuda again rules out snap election, new Cabinet lineup

Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda on Monday once again rejected opposition calls for him to dissolve the Lower House and hold a snap general election in the near future.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Jun 24, 2008

Australian architect makes homes that coexist with their surroundings

In 2006 it was the Australia-Japan Year of Exchange. This year, it would seem, is the Australia-Roppongi Year of Exchange. Not only is a huge exhibition of the late Aboriginal artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye being held in Roppongi at the National Art Center until July 28, but Gallery Ma, the specialist...
Japan Times
BASKETBALL / ONE-ON-ONE WITH ...
Jun 22, 2008

Aoshima provides enthusiastic analysis for Japan's hoops fans

The Japan Times will be featuring periodic interviews with players in the bj-league — Japan's first professional basketball circuit — which wrapped up its third season in May.
Japan Times
LIFE
Jun 22, 2008

Grounded rulers of the sky

His sharp, calm gaze follows yet another aircraft swooping down from the cloudless sky, its tires screeching in clouds of blue smoke as it returns to Earth on Haneda's concrete runway. One more flight successfully completed, he thinks — and now the next.
CULTURE / Books
Jun 22, 2008

An impressionable connoisseur of cultures

TRAVELS IN THE EAST by Donald Richie, with a foreword by Stephen Mansfield. Berkeley, California: Stone Bridge Press, 2007, 180 pp., $14.95 (paper) Donald Richie continues to write learnedly, wittily and insightfully about Japan, of whose culture he is one of the world's greatest interpreters. Readers...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jun 22, 2008

Has Japan's dogged idealism of '68 become truly poodled?

On June 7, The New York Times' op-ed columnist Bob Herbert wrote an intriguing piece about the United States in 1968, recalling the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy exactly 40 years ago, and also referring to Sen. Barack Obama clinching the 2008 Democratic Party nomination for the presidency....
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Jun 22, 2008

How can the press be free if it's used as a public-relations tool?

The Supreme Court's decision on June 12 to reverse a lower-court ruling that had found in favor of a women's group received a fair share of concerned media coverage. The suit involved a program NHK had produced about a 2001 citizens' tribunal, which prosecuted Japan's wartime leaders on behalf of sex...
JAPAN
Jun 21, 2008

Fukuda gets report on boosting immigrants

Members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party submitted a bold report Friday to Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, calling for Japan to increase its foreign residents to up to 10 percent of the nation's population in the next 50 years.
JAPAN
Jun 21, 2008

After the drama, the curtain drops quietly on the current Diet session

The curtain drops on the ordinary Diet session Saturday, quietly and without the catharsis the Democratic Party of Japan aimed for with its last-minute censure motion against Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda last week.
BUSINESS / U.S. BUSINESS SCHOOL SYMPOSIUM
Jun 21, 2008

Trading off the benefits of a 'globalizing' world

Despite much hype about the world becoming flat and more global, the world is in fact becoming more regional than global, said Richard Rumelt, a professor of business strategy at UCLA Anderson Business School.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Jun 21, 2008

Gaijin of the Inland Sea

Believe it or not, I am not the only foreigner living on an island in the Seto Inland Sea. Allow me to uncover other insane gaijin "doing it" island style. And these are no ordinary people, mind you.
COMMENTARY
Jun 20, 2008

Tribute to the good sense of a brighter Bush

LOS ANGELES — We in the West are always grateful and utterly relieved when East Asians manage to take significant steps away from the risk of serious conflict.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 20, 2008

'The Magic Hour'

Koki Mitani is the reigning king of comedy in Japan, as the writer and sometimes director of a string of hit stage plays, TV series and three feature films that culminated in 2006 with "The Uchoten Hotel (Suite Dream)." This laugh-packed take-off on the 1932 Greta Garbo classic "Grand Hotel," based on...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / BACKSTREET STORIES
Jun 20, 2008

Sake and sculptures in an Aoyama backstreet

Tokyo's backstreets can be dank or swank, but on the whole, they're safe. The biggest risk lies in the lure of diversion. Wander off the beaten path on your way to buy eggs or mail a letter, and you'll get sucked in by bizarre Lilliputian entrepreneurships, copper-clad fronts of prewar wooden shacks,...
EDITORIALS
Jun 20, 2008

Death of a serial killer

Tsutomu Miyazaki, the death-row inmate convicted of killing four girls from 1988 to 1989, was executed Tuesday, as were two other men. The number of death-row inmates hanged on the orders of Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama has now reached 13, topping the post-1993 record of 10 ordered hanged by Justice...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 20, 2008

'Eastern Promises'

Filmmaker David Cronenberg continues to be obsessed by the human body, and all the things people do to it, in the brilliantly staged "Eastern Promises."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jun 20, 2008

The rhythm is gonna Gotye

"There are just tons of bands in Melbourne, and I think there is a bit of a chip on the shoulder that too many of them are going unrecognized." So says Wally De Backer, aka Gotye.
CULTURE / Music
Jun 20, 2008

Babyshambles "Oh! What a Lovely Tour"

If Babyshambles frontman Pete Doherty farted out Britain's national anthem accompanied by a barking dog, I would fork out cash for it. Pete is not just a rock star — he's a religion.
EDITORIALS
Jun 20, 2008

A North Korean about-face

North Korea has promised to begin a "reinvestigation" of the fate of Japanese nationals abducted by its agents and to hand over the four remaining members of the nine leftists who hijacked a Japan Airlines jet to Pyongyang in 1970 along with two wives of the leftists.
Japan Times
SOCCER
Jun 19, 2008

Azzurri send France packing in World Cup final rematch

ZURICH (AP) A big, bright rainbow stretched over the Letizgrund as Italian and French players walked solemnly on the field and sang their national anthems. It was a tantalizing moment, portending perhaps that for one of these soccer powers "the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true."
Japan Times
JAPAN / RETRACING ROUTES
Jun 19, 2008

'Nikkei' craft own unique ethnicity, samba to manga

Igor Inocima's face filled with contentment as he described the achievement of introducing the culture of manga to Brazil, where his grandparents emigrated to some 80 years ago.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jun 19, 2008

Japan's summer festivals: In a field of their own

Fancy some J-pop kitsch in Ibaraki? How about a spot of opera in picturesque Matsumoto? Or perhaps you'd prefer some Afro-Brazilian percussion and taiko legends on the remote Sado Island? It's music festival season in Japan again, and to kick things off, our music scribes tell you where to go and who...
Reader Mail
Jun 19, 2008

Orwellian logic floats to the top

Am I to understand that a KNIFE BAN is being considered in some quarters as a result of the Akihabara tragedy? What kind of Orwellian nightmare is this country turning into?
CULTURE / Art
Jun 19, 2008

'Mark Jenkins and Miho Kinomura: Glazed Paradise'

Diesel Gallery, Aoyama, Tokyo
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / IN BLOOM
Jun 18, 2008

Spiderwort

In the dew of little things, the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 17, 2008

A vanishing Europe and lifestyle

BRUSSELS — What will it mean to be European 25 years from now? Unlike the United States, whose history as a "melting pot" has given Americans a truly multiethnic character, native Europeans are becoming an endangered species. Europe badly needs immigrants, yet is not culturally prepared to welcome...

Longform

Japan's growing ranks of centenarians are redefining what it means to live in a super-aging society.
What comes after 100?