Mick Corliss - The Japan Times

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Mick Corliss

JAPAN

Aug 30, 2000

Talks to hold up Kitakyushu as environmental success story

Asia, with more than half the world's population and economies that continue to grow, poses one of the biggest environmental challenges of the coming century. The United Nations predicts that by 2025 more than half the region's population will have moved to the already packed metropolises.

JAPAN

Aug 27, 2000

Cancer-causing chemicals found at Yokohama site

YOKOHAMA -- Just above the junction of the Tsurumi and Toriyama rivers lies a fenced-off area that looks like a simple abandoned lot.

JAPAN

Aug 25, 2000

Updated environment plan to add new economic options

The Basic Environment Plan -- Japan's 5-year-old master plan for a more environmentally sustainable society -- is in the middle of a seismic revision.

JAPAN

Aug 10, 2000

Critics slam government 'sinks' proposal

What is a forest?

JAPAN

Aug 4, 2000

Drink machines called handy polluters

They never sleep, gripe about overtime or quibble over paychecks. And -- with more than 5 million of them scattered around the nation -- they are ubiquitous.

JAPAN

Jul 21, 2000

Groups hit G8 inaction on illegal logging

As the Group of Eight major nations kick off three days of summit meetings in Okinawa today, environmentalists are mounting an effort to steal a slice of the limelight.

ENVIRONMENT

Jul 20, 2000

Fears for Okinawa's unique ecosystem

Okinawa Prefecture punctuates the Japanese archipelago as the period on its southern border. Stretching westward like an island path leading to Taiwan, the island group, though small, is teeming with a diverse abundance of plant and animal life.

JAPAN

Jul 16, 2000

The unrivaled madness of Shinjuku

When it comes to congestion, JR Shinjuku Station is king. This station is the Yamanote Line's undisputed champion of traffic, rowdy customers and sheer bedlam and confusion.

JAPAN

Jul 13, 2000

Kawaguchi to look to private-sector past

Newly appointed Environment Agency chief Yoriko Kawaguchi will use her private-sector experience to strengthen the agency as it prepares to become a ministry, but says her background has taught her to be wary of government regulation.

JAPAN

Jun 9, 2000

Ainu law fails to address grievances

ASAHIKAWA, Hokkaido — For thousands of years, Kenichi Kawamura's ancestors owned nothing but had access to everything.

JAPAN

Jun 7, 2000

Volcano leaves Lake Toya in limbo

ABUTA, Hokkaido — Lake Toya is silent. The smell of sulfur is heavy in the air.

JAPAN

Jun 7, 2000

Windswept town realizes gusts can be a clean money-spinner

TOMAMAE, Hokkaido — They tower above the ocean on bluffs and farmland, spinning like otherworldly contraptions misplaced on Hokkaido's bucolic coast. But the livestock don't seem to mind.

JAPAN

Jun 7, 2000

Drag racing finds new meaning with plow horses

ASAHIKAWA, Hokkaido — Skirting a fresh pile of manure, I settle in behind the well-muscled, veiny flanks of a Banei racehorse.

JAPAN

May 3, 2000

Look to past to build in tune with nature, landscaper says

Japan has a brilliant landscaping tradition and would do well to revive it in the pursuit of ecologically sound development, according to the man recognized as the founder of ecological planning.

COMMUNITY

Apr 23, 2000

JR East's No. 20 'just your average station'

Like many Yamanote Loop stations, Gotanda's name speaks of the area's past. Gotanda literally means 5,000 sq. meters of rice paddies, "tan" formerly being a measure for land area equivalent to 1,000 sq. meters.

JAPAN

Mar 23, 2000

Tobacco-curbing target up in smoke

Up in smoke -- that is the simplest way to describe the fate of an ambitious Health and Welfare Ministry plan to drastically cut the number of smokers as well as overall tobacco consumption in Japan by 2010.

CULTURE / Books

Feb 29, 2000

Japanese politics are gray, not green

GREEN POLITICS IN JAPAN, by Lam Peng Er. Routledge, March 1999, 232 pp., $90. The next 100 years have been dubbed the century of the environment. While this pronouncement may be a bit premature, even inflated, it reflects the swelling interest in environmental issues. From global warming and dioxins,...

JAPAN

Feb 2, 2000

Nago airport plan seen as dugong threat

Less playful than dolphins and not as awesomely powerful as whales, dugongs have somehow failed to capture the popular imagination like their more dynamic cetacean brethren.

JAPAN

Feb 1, 2000

Nago base plan threatens dugong habitat

Less playful than dolphins and not as awesomely powerful as whales, dugongs have somehow failed to capture the popular imagination like their more dynamic cetacean brethren. But this endangered creature, found off the east coast of Okinawa's main island, may soon steal the limelight.

JAPAN

Jan 19, 2000

Washington not ready to swallow Kyoto Protocol

Staff writer The United States is determined to realize a workable international agreement to fight global warming, but serious sticking points remain before Washington can ratify the Kyoto Protocol, U.S. Climate Change negotiator Mark Hambley said on Wednesday. Hambley, who has headed climate change...

You can often see generations of families enjoying performances together at Fuji Rock Festival.

Japan’s summer music festivals are feeling the heat in more ways than one

Akiko Trush says her experience with the neurological disorder dystonia left her feeling like she wanted to chop her own hand off.

The neurological disorder that 'kills culture'

By Tomoko Otake

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