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Japan Times
CULTURE / Books / How the visual arts shaped Japan's modern literature
Jan 6, 2018

Yukio Mishima: Saints and seppuku

In March 1937, an official in the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Azusa Hiraoka, traveled to Europe on government business and acquired some guides to Italian museums.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / FOREIGN AGENDA
Sep 25, 2017

Buying a house in Japan can be an investment in joy

The 'return' on your investment in a home in Japan is best measured in terms of the pleasure it will yield and the doorway to the intimacies of community and the Japanese mind it will lure you into.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Sep 23, 2017

A ruff guide to Seeing Eye dogs in Japan

Ariel is a devoted labrador. Named after the title character in Disney's "The Little Mermaid," Ariel can’t get enough of her user, 37-year-old Kanako Suzuki. Ariel rolls on her back, begging to be petted, and when Suzuki joins her on the floor, the animal jumps onto her lap — all 24 kilograms of...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / BLACK EYE
May 21, 2017

Having trouble wrapping your head around Japan? Help with mental health is at hand

Black Eye speaks with professionals trained to offer guidance to those struggling to cope with a new environment.
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health
Sep 1, 2016

Global warming exposes fossils in Greenland from time Earth was like Mars

The earliest fossil evidence of life on Earth has been found in rocks 3.7 billion years old in Greenland, raising chances of life on Mars aeons ago when both planets were similarly desolate, scientists said on Wednesday.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 30, 2015

Down and out with Tokyo's manga artists

That Japanese movies are often adapted from Japanese manga is no secret. Less well known is the subgenre of films about the lives of some Japanese mangaka (manga artists), which is informally known as mangakamono. Many of these fictional biopics have gone on to become local blockbusters, but we'll get...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Mar 4, 2015

John Caird delivers home truths with 'Twelfth Night'

As an Honorary Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, John Caird may be one of the leading pillars of the English theater establishment, but in a recent interview with The Japan Times, this acclaimed director of plays, musicals and opera declared, "In a sense, some part of me is becoming...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / BLACK EYE
Dec 17, 2014

Japan and others gain from Jamaican brain drain

In the last part of this series on Jamaicans in Japan, Baye McNeil speaks to a teacher, author and poet in Yokohama and an attorney in Tokyo.
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 9, 2014

Aging brings gray hair ... and greater happiness

In our mind's eye, old age is to be endured as much as enjoyed, since people fear declining health, growing dependence and increasing social isolation. Then why do public opinion surveys show that, on average, people count themselves happier after age 65?
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 9, 2014

Cinema's silent moment with God

If one word could describe "Into Great Silence," what would that be? The film's creator Philip Groning doesn't hesitate when he says, "Monastery." Almost a decade years after its European release, "Into Great Silence" will finally open in Japan this month. In an interview with The Japan Times in Tokyo,...
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Apr 26, 2014

Mini-revolutions may add up to a change

1949. The war was over. Slowly, a numbed populace rose from the dead. That year, 2.7 million babies were born — a record high, never surpassed.
Japan Times
JAPAN / TELLING LIVES
Apr 22, 2014

Ex-refugee uses own experiences to help others

As a former refugee who was forced to leave his own country during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, Iranian-born Sena Vafa hopes to raise awareness about the plight of refugees here in Japan.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Jan 10, 2014

Educator with a mission sends out support from Hiroshima

Some people seem to have a knack for turning their hand to anything that comes along and, moreover, making a success of it. This is certainly the case with Hiroshima-based Adam Beck. Over the years, the American has been a children's theater director, an English teacher, a newspaper columnist and the...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Dec 26, 2013

Second opinion: Our Top 3 films in cross-review

Regular JT film critics Mark Schilling, Kaori Shoji and Giovanni Fazio got together at the Uplink theater/restaurant in Shibuya to talk about each other's No. 1 films for 2013: "Cloud Atlas" (Fazio), "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" (Shoji) and "Kaguya-hime no Monogatari (The Tale of Princess Kaguya)"...
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health
Dec 26, 2013

Budget limits trim NASA's plans for big projects

The Cassini spacecraft is in splendid shape as it circles Saturn. Conceived in the 1980s and launched in 1997, Cassini arrived at the gas-giant planet in 2004 and has continued to deliver stunning images of the jewel of the solar system.
Japan Times
BUSINESS / Companies
Jul 29, 2013

Tokio Marine targets ASEAN for expansion abroad

Tokio Marine Holdings Inc., the nation's second-largest nonlife insurer, is seeking to expand in Southeast Asia as Japan's shrinking population erodes its domestic market.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Jun 29, 2013

Multimedia artist finds community in Odawara nurtures her creativity

Sunlight streams in through large windows that look out on a sweeping Pacific Ocean vista. Artworks stand waiting in various stages of creation, while mobiles twist and dance in the sea breeze. This space, known as Atelier Hayakawa, is where Canadian multimedia artist Kirsten Woest comes to dream, to...
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health
Jun 26, 2013

A mother helps son in his struggle with schizophrenia

The mother drives her son everywhere because he is not well enough to drive. He sits next to her, and at the red lights she looks over and studies him: how quiet he is, how stiffly he sits, hands in his lap, fingers fidgeting slightly, a tic that occasionally blooms into a full fluttering motion he makes...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Entertainment news
Jun 15, 2013

Actor Ethan Hawke: still playing all the angles

Ethan Hawke is out and about in New York, the city he's lived in for 30 years, a place where famous faces slide past every day. He's wearing a baseball cap, a hoodie and a pair of cords. It's an outfit you might think he chose especially to look nondescript, but in reality it's because he likes corduroy...
Japan Times
WORLD / Crime & Legal
Feb 18, 2013

Stay of execution?

Jerry Givens executed 62 people. His routine and conviction never wavered. He'd shave the person's head, lay his hand on the bald pate and ask for God's forgiveness for the condemned. Then, he would strap the person into Virginia's electric chair.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Nov 4, 2012

Yoshiko Tatsumi: Cookery guru serves wisdom with her soups

"Never fight a war with Chinese people, because we would lose," Yoshiko Tatsumi sternly warned, "with absolute certainty," a 40-strong group of mostly middle-aged women gathered recently in her spacious three-story residence set in gardens in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 23, 2012

Preference should go to real, rational women

In the Dominican Republic last month, a pregnant teenager suffering from leukemia had her chemotherapy delayed, because doctors feared that the treatment could terminate her pregnancy and therefore violate the nation's strict anti-abortion law. After consultations between doctors, lawyers, and the girl's...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jun 24, 2012

Fumiko Hayashi: Haunted to the grave by her wartime 'flute and drums'

If you compare the treatment dealt out in the immediate postwar period to Japanese writers who supported their nation's military aggression in World War II with that meted out to such writers in Europe, the Japanese literary collaborators seem to have got off lightly.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / HAVE YOUR SAY
May 22, 2012

The elephant in the foreigner's room now has a name: microaggression

Some positive and negative readers' reactions to Debito Arudou's provocative and widely read May 1 Just Be Cause column, "Yes, I can use chopsticks: the everyday 'microaggressions' that grind us down":
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Apr 28, 2012

Mashiko-based U.S. potter vows he'll not be defeated by 3/11 destruction

Harvey Young, a ceramic artist for over 40 years who has spent nearly three decades in Mashiko, Tochigi Prefecture, knows a thing or two about shaping beauty out of chaos — and about the sudden misfires life can bring. Even his early love for pottery warped and melded with other interests until it...
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
May 31, 2011

The edified and TEDified in Japan

On May 21, Tokyo's third annual TEDx event was held at Miraikan (the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation) in Odaiba. Though officially closed until June 11 due to the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake, Miraikan hosted 300 guests to this year's event: TEDxTokyo 2011: Enter the Unknown.

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