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Japan Times
BASKETBALL / ONE-ON-ONE WITH ...
May 18, 2012

Kyoto's Allred has unique perspective on game, life

The Japan Times periodically features interviews with players in the bj-league. Lance Allred of the Kyoto Hannaryz is the subject of this week's profile.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
May 17, 2012

There is trouble on Kafka's shore

Seventy-six-year-old theater director Yukio Ninagawa is famed and honored the world over for his magnificently visualized stagings of Shakespeare and Ancient Greek tragedies — as well as modern Japanese plays.
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / JAPAN TIMES BLOGROLL
May 16, 2012

Tokyo Green Space

What do you see when you look at Tokyo? Hypermodern constructions of steel and concrete? Cubic, characterless office buildings? Jared Braiterman sees green ... in the back streets, in the small cracks of dirt on the sidewalks and on his balcony. He finds patches, slivers and swaths of nature that tourists...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
May 13, 2012

Born of disaster, modern architecture is itself now an ongoing disaster

In the French writer-director Jacques Tati's superb 1967 film "Play Time," people are like prisoners condemned to roam about in and amid the glass cages of high-rise office blocks. They are lost, both to the world and themselves. In the world of Tati, who died in 1982 aged 75, all cities look alike;...
EDITORIALS
May 13, 2012

The sunny side of myopia

A new comprehensive study of eyesight around the world has found that 80 to 90 percent of secondary school graduates in East Asia suffer from nearsightedness, or myopia. The new study, published in the Lancet medical journal recently, found that neither genes nor increased time reading and writing were...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
May 12, 2012

Can Japan's countryside be saved from the edge of extinction?

Once upon a time in Okayama, Japan, lived an old man and an old woman who had no children of their own. One day, the old man went into the forest to cut down bamboo while the old woman went to the river to wash clothes. While at the river, she noticed a giant peach bobbing up and down in the water. She...
BUSINESS
May 12, 2012

Toyota leaves GM trailing in global sales in first quarter

Toyota Motor Corp. sold the most cars and trucks in the world in the first three months of the year as it made up for production losses caused by natural disasters.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink
May 11, 2012

Mandarin Oriental stands by Japan produce

Every day, crates from Japan filled with still-wriggling live fish, coral-colored lobes of uni (sea urchin) and seafood fastidiously wrapped in paper smeared with wasabi (to discourage bacteria) arrive at the Michelin-starred French restaurant Amber at Hong Kong's Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Executive chef...
COMMENTARY / World
May 9, 2012

Let foreign aid leverage development in Egypt

The question that still underlies much thinking about economic development is this: What can we do to kick-start economic growth and reduce poverty around the world?
COMMENTARY
May 9, 2012

Discontent with politicians

Voters in democratic countries are increasingly disenchanted with traditional party politics and regard most politicians with skepticism at best and as generally untrustworthy.
CULTURE / Books
May 6, 2012

Japan's modern haiku master

IKIMONOFUEI: Poetic Composition on Living Things, by Kaneko Tohta. Red Moon Press, 2011, 91 pp., $12.00 (paperback) THE FUTURE OF HAIKU: An Interview with Kaneko Tohta. Red Moon Press 2011, 137 pp., $12.00 (paperback) These two handy pocket-size volumes are the first of four to be issued by the Red Moon...
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
May 1, 2012

It's just because . . . foreigners know best

You seldom see the sight these days of pairs of crew-cut white males in pressed white shirts and ties pedaling around cities in Japan. The sight is from a bygone age, largely relegated to history: The white man with a burden to educate and enlighten the natives, in this case about the one true religion,...
JAPAN
Apr 30, 2012

Academics eye global cooperation

The presidents and vice presidents of 14 universities in 10 countries and areas around the world gathered in Tokyo on Sunday to discuss how to nurture globally minded citizens in today's changing world.
COMMENTARY
Apr 30, 2012

Possession underscores nuclear contradictions

Can the differing world reactions to India's missile test and North Korea's attempted "satellite launch" be explained by the familiar saying that success has a thousand fathers while failure is an orphan? The more likely explanation is that the two tests are forcing the international community to confront...
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / BACKSTREET STORIES
Apr 29, 2012

Foxtrotting around Asukayama

Rising amid flat farmland, Asukayama had long been an untended haunt of foxes and their small prey when, in 1720, Yoshimune Tokugawa, the eighth shogun to rule in Edo (present-day Tokyo), had the hilly upland planted with 1,200 cherry trees, 100 maples and 100 pines, to create a public park for flower-viewing....
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Apr 28, 2012

Springtime comes — and goes — on the Love-Love Island

Spring has sprung on Shiraishi Island. The cherry blossoms have bloomed and gone, their fallen pink petals pushed back into the good earth by passersby. We have attended the Kobo Daishi Spring Festival at the temple to be purified. The fishermen have changed from going out in their boats in the warmth...
COMMENTARY
Apr 27, 2012

Increasing condemnation of the Cuba embargo

At the recent Summit of the Americas, Latin American governments roundly condemned the U.S. embargo on Cuba. — only days after Pope Benedict XVI had added his voice against the embargo.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Apr 27, 2012

'Thermae Romae'

Reading manga can teach you a lot, be the subject wine ("Kami no Shizuku [Drops of God]"), gourmet food ("Oishinbo") or the arcane world of feudal-era concubines ("Sakuran"). But the Japanese bath? Isn't that a subject Japanese are immersed in almost from Day One? Why would they need to read about it...
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 24, 2012

How much should one's birth gender matter?

Jenna Talackova reached the finals of Miss Universe Canada last month, before being disqualified because she was not a "natural born" female. The tall, beautiful blonde told the media that she had considered herself a female since she was four years old, had begun hormone treatment at 14, and had sex...
Reader Mail
Apr 15, 2012

Pondering a flawed creation

It is very nice of Dipak Basu, in his April 12 letter "A respectable view of 'heaven," to tell us benighted Westerners "raised through Judaistic principles" what we believe, but he is so far out of touch that he might as well be on another planet.
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Apr 12, 2012

Asian rivals elbow Japan aside in Washington

In the year of a U.S. presidential election, Japan is increasingly being overshadowed by its Asian neighbors in Washington just as the capital is increasingly functioning as a forum on global issues, according to a leading American expert.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Apr 8, 2012

Lack of strong ties spurs business of dying alone

New businesses arising to meet new needs tell us much about the times we live in. A cleaning company named Green Heart, for example, thrives on a peculiar expertise. Its website explains: "Sadly, it often happens that unclaimed bodies go long unnoticed. In summer after two days, in winter after four...

Longform

Members of the nonprofit group Japan Youth Memorial Association search for the remains of dead soldiers in a cave in Okinawa Prefecture in February.
The long search for Japan’s lost soldiers