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SPORTS / SPORTS SCOPE
Jan 20, 2000

Kokudo's Tucker still showing kids how it's done

After a dozen years in the National Hockey League, a season playing in Italy, and now into his third campaign in Japan, one might expect John Tucker to look forward to that 9 a.m. practice about as much as John Rocker looks forward to his next trip to New York.
LIFE
Jan 20, 2000

Living within the abundance of less

When Osamu Nakamura is not in the mountains of Nepal studying woodblock print making, he's almost always in the small farmhouse among the terraced rice fields in the interior of Shikoku that he calls home. He has no telephone, so if you want to visit, you have to stop by to see if he is in.
LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA
Jan 19, 2000

Space on the range

When the deliciously innovative iMacs were unveiled last year there was a collective gasp: What?! No floppy drive? How do I transfer files?
ENVIRONMENT
Jan 19, 2000

Visit to Toad Hall: hip-hop as a way of life

I have a friend, an exceptional naturalist, who has traveled this country widely from Iriomote-jima to Hokkaido, yet who swears that he will never visit the Ogasawara Islands.
LIFE / Travel
Jan 19, 2000

Nagano's 'time-slip' onsen

Many hot spring resorts these days look so similar that it's sometimes hard to remember where you are. Not Bessho Onsen.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 18, 2000

Here comes Japan's e-boom

Let me make some predictions about Japan's economic performance in and after 2000. I believe that recovery in the next 12 to 18 months will be slow but robust expansion will take place after that. The boom will not benefit everyone, as did the past expansion, however. It will be accompanied by the polarization...
JAPAN
Jan 18, 2000

Regional Special: Okinawa

Isle's airport between reef and a hard place> Staff writer ISHIGAKI ISLAND, Okinawa Pref. -- Passengers stare dreamily from the plane. Some crane their necks for a glimpse of the cobalt coastline and Ishigaki's famed coral reefs. But all are jerked back to reality when the plane touches down and suddenly...
CULTURE / Books
Jan 18, 2000

A life between East and West

THE MASK CARVER'S SON, A Novel by Alyson Richman. Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA, 371 pp., $23.95. This is an imagined autobiography of a Japanese artist who studied in Paris around the year 1900.
JAPAN
Jan 17, 2000

Kobe closes last quake shelter

Staff writer KOBE -- Local government officials marked the fifth anniversary of the Kobe earthquake by announcing that the last temporary shelter has been closed and that it was time to move on and take stock of the lessons learned. But while much of Kobe and the surrounding area has recovered, many...
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 17, 2000

Cut U.S. military presence

Japan faces intense pressure to settle uncertainties regarding the relocation of the U.S. Marine Corps heliport now at the Futenma Air Station in Okinawa before July, when it hosts a Group of Eight summit. Unless the problems are settled by then, U.S. President Bill Clinton is likely to face a firestorm...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Jan 16, 2000

Masayuki Kurokawa

At the recent Art of Dining Exhibition sponsored by Refugees International-Japan, Masayuki Kurokawa and his wife, Taki Katoh, cooperated in presenting a table setting profoundly and strikingly simple. It symbolized, they said, "the harmonization of natural and man-made phenomena."
JAPAN
Jan 16, 2000

Tough town beaten to despair as jobs dry up

For 70-year-old Mikami, winter life on the streets of Tokyo has become so unbearable that flirting with a suicide fantasy has become his favorite pastime.
LIFE / Food & Drink
Jan 13, 2000

A winning resolution: wine tastings among friends

If you've already broken a few New Year's resolutions, welcome to the club: You belong to the majority. But don't worry; just put a positive new twist on the onerous matter of New Year resolutions. Resolve to make wine an even greater pleasure. Herewith, a few ideas:
COMMUNITY / How-tos / GETTING THINGS DONE
Jan 12, 2000

Win some, lose some

Like many of our readers, I continue to miss Gary Larson's The Far Side cartoons. Now I have 366 of them in a millennium collection brought up to date with color and appropriate historic dates which the publisher, Andrews McMeel of Kansas City, calls "a refreshingly irreverent retrospective of the last...
EDITORIALS
Jan 11, 2000

Declaring war against AIDS

It is reckoned that the AIDS scourge began about 20 years ago. In the two decades since then, it has claimed more than 16 million lives. The World Health Organization estimates that 33.6 million people, 1.2 million of them children, live with the HIV infection that is the disease's precursor. The speed...
JAPAN
Jan 10, 2000

Make 'Rebuilding Confidence' the government slogan for 2000

Last year a series of mishaps shook our faith in various things we have grown to trust over the years, from the H-II rocket failure and the crumbling tunnels of our shinkansen lines to the nuclearcriticality accident in Tokai, Ibaraki Prefecture.
CULTURE / Books
Jan 10, 2000

Asia's forgotten civilization

THE MONS: A Civilization of Southeast Asia, by Emmanuel Guillon, translated and edited by James V. Di Crocco. Bangkok: Siam Society, 1999, 900 baht. Every student of Southeast Asian culture is bound to become aware of a kind of empty chapter that is nevertheless pregnant with meaning and substance....
JAPAN
Jan 10, 2000

Youth likely to vote despite distrust

Many new adults polled Monday morning by The Japan Times said they would exercise their just-acquired right to vote in this year's Lower House election, but their comments also revealed mixed feelings toward politics and even outright distrust in lawmakers. "I'm going (to the polls), though I don't...
COMMENTARY
Jan 9, 2000

Doomsayers have it wrong

LONDON -- Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, is a deeply spiritual and thoughtful man. Again and again he brings us back to the really central question of our times -- central in all societies and all religions, and becoming more so in a globalized age. What now binds us together?...
CULTURE / Music
Jan 8, 2000

Oh, the glamour of poetic injustice

Violence aspires to poetry and vice versa in "Death in Granada," an American/Spanish production that sheds a fleeting but eerie light on one of Spain's greatest poets: Federico Garcia Lorca.
LIFE / Style & Design
Jan 6, 2000

Ring in the new millennium with health-friendly rituals

If the new year is all about getting a fresh start, then the combination of new year, new century and new millennium offers the possibility for a fresher start than most other January renewals. Now is the time to take a close look at your life and decide what needs changing, what needs discarding and...
JAPAN
Jan 5, 2000

Rural regions accentuate their pluses to lure city dwellers

Staff writer AYA, Miyazaki Pref. -- A small window on the upper floor of a two-story log house offers a magnificent view of mountains covered in dense deciduous forests of various color gradations. This landscape, coupled with the area's policy of promoting organic agriculture, prompted Teruhiko and...
EDITORIALS
Jan 4, 2000

A new era for Russia

Russian President Boris Yeltsin will be remembered, among other things, for his sense of drama. Last Friday's announcement that he would be stepping down as president was perfectly in character. It focused international attention on him -- at least momentarily -- as the world prepared to meet the new...
CULTURE / Music
Jan 4, 2000

The top 21 albums through bleary eyes and fuzzy logic

Here is a list of the best albums that have loitered on my turntables during 1999. It wasn't the best of years, so thank Buddha for Mogwai, Campag Velocet, Death in Vegas and, erm, some girl band . . . oh, what's the name? Maybe it'll come to me later.
SOCCER / J. League
Jan 3, 2000

Grampus Eight hoists Emperor's Cup

Nagoya Grampus Eight walked off with what was probably the world's first soccer title of the millennium after downing Sanfrecce Hiroshima 2-0 in the final of the Emperor's Cup at Tokyo's National Stadium on a beautiful, sunny New Year's Day.
COMMUNITY
Jan 3, 2000

Picture-book village looks to the children

Once upon a time, sometime in 1992, there were two communities, Kijo-cho and Ishikawauchi, nestled high in the mountains of Miyazaki Prefecture. As in many such rural communities, the sound of children's voices was becoming a rarity as young families left to find their fortune in the city of Miyazaki,...
CULTURE / Music
Jan 3, 2000

It's not an easy trick to pick one out of 108 for best of year

It is time once again to look back over some of the most significant events of the previous year, 1999.
COMMENTARY
Jan 1, 2000

Japan looks for a purpose

The 1990s is said to have been a "lost decade" for Japan. That may be true. In May 1991, Japan's economy plunged into a slump that would be called the "Heisei Recession." In October 1993, the economy "bottomed out," but ever since then it has remained in the doldrums. The protracted slump has had extensive...
EDITORIALS
Jan 1, 2000

Let's make a new start

People around the world are celebrating the arrival of a new century and the start of a new millennium. We all feel we are in a new age, and few are willing to wait another year, as the purists insist, before we close out the 20th century.This is particularly true for Japan, where the last 10 years have...
JAPAN
Jan 1, 2000

Public must face higher tax burden: Imai

Japan must act on its deteriorating financial health by launching discussions on fiscal reform and revealing the results to the public, said Takashi Imai, chairman of the Japan Federation of Economic Organizations (Keidanren).

Longform

Totopa in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward was picked by consultants TTNE as the best sauna of the year.
Japan’s sauna movement: Relax, refresh, repeat