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COMMENTARY / World
Jun 30, 2010

Korean peace still elusive, six decades on

HONOLULU, EAST-WEST WIRE — The tragic Korean War, which began 60 years ago, resulted from the post-World War II division of Korea by the United States and the Soviet Union — intended to be temporary — and from the political struggle that developed between Seoul and Pyongyang. After the division,...
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / Japan Pulse
Jun 29, 2010

Designers rock the yukata

Buoyed by a renewed popularity in made-in-Japan traditions, designers are updating the yukata of summer with both retro and modern designs.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHO'S WHO
Jun 29, 2010

French patissier's dream becomes reality in Japan

When Antoine Santos was growing up in the port of Marseille in southern France, he dreamed of becoming a pastry teacher by the age of 30. Little did he imagine his dream would come true — in Japan.
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Jun 27, 2010

Still shy of reversion after all these years

NEW YORK — Just about the time Yukio Hatoyama resigned as Japan's prime minister, apologizing to the Okinawa people in tears, I was writing about the last day of Yukio Mishima's life — Nov. 25, 1970.
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jun 27, 2010

Where's the spirit of Japan's troublemaking coffee-house Hobbits?

There was a time, in the 1960s and early '70s, when the people of Japan were not apathetic about what was being done on their soil. The opposition here to the U.S. invasion of Vietnam and Japan's support of it was large scale and vocal. Mass demonstrations were frequently held across the nation, participated...
CULTURE / Books
Jun 27, 2010

America's man from Japan

Edwin O. Reischauer, U.S. ambassador to Japan (1961-66), set the bar very high for all of his successors. Born and raised in Japan by missionary parents, when U.S. President John F. Kennedy called him into diplomatic service, he was already a prominent scholar who pioneered Japanese studies in the U.S....
LIFE
Jun 27, 2010

Predator-prey relationships play large part in zoo's setup

For animals in the wild, life is defined by the relationship between predator and prey — but incorporating that dynamic into zoos can be extremely difficult.
JAPAN
Jun 26, 2010

Returnee gets 6 1/2 years for cabby robbery

A U.S. citizen was convicted Friday and sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison in a Tokyo District Court lay judge trial for his involvement, with two other foreign nationals, in robbing a taxi and wounding the driver in 2008.
JAPAN / DECISION 2010
Jun 25, 2010

Showdown could reshape political scene

The last House of Councilors election in 2007 heralded a change of regime, with the then ruling Liberal Democratic Party losing control of the chamber. That loss was followed by the swift resignations of two LDP prime ministers, before a crushing defeat in the House of Representatives poll last August...
Japan Times
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Jun 25, 2010

The BeSeTo of three worlds

The roots of Japanese folk music are being brought back to life with a modern twist at the BeSeTo Theatre Festival.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 25, 2010

'Flowers'

Directors steal from each other constantly — sometimes out of love, sometimes envy, sometimes a tangle of motives. The results range from Brian De Palma's famed "Odessa Steps" sequence in "The Untouchables," which thrillingly referenced the Sergei Eisenstein silent classic "The Battleship Potemkin,"...
Japan Times
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Jun 25, 2010

'Beautified Taboo' fuses fashion, art

"Violent" and "gruesome" aren't adjectives typically associated with the world of fashion. However, curator Vivienne U.H. Doan hopes to change that.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jun 25, 2010

Caribou asserts latest album is 'uniquely mine'

Daniel Snaith is a remarkable individual. Not just because of his astounding, cerebral, diacritic music that, nearly a decade and five albums later, is seeping into the minds of people searching for, as one recent reviewer put it, "electronics for grownups."
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Jun 25, 2010

Drop in export growth signals cooler recovery

Growth in exports slowed in May for the third straight month, signaling the pace of the economic recovery is likely to cool.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 24, 2010

Face to face with Internet privacy issues

NEW YORK — Long ago, when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was in grade school, I wrote a book ("Release 2.1: A Design for Living in the Digital Age") in which I lauded something called gP3h (now p3p), the platform for privacy preferences. I was sure that people would start using P3 or something like...
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Jun 23, 2010

A veteran plumbs his path to Japanese fluency

On a trans-Pacific flight to Narita several months ago, I struck up a conversation with a passenger who was upbeat about living in Japan. After six months, he told me with a self-satisfied grin, he had "just about got all the hiragana down pat."
Japan Times
JAPAN / EXPLAINER
Jun 22, 2010

NTT communication giant, answerable to state, politics

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., the nation's biggest phone company, holds a unique place in corporate Japan.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Japan Pulse
Jun 21, 2010

Big (Only) in Japan? 'Greensleeves'

Thank you for calling. All of our operators are busy. Please listen to 'Greensleeves' for an eternity.
Reader Mail
Jun 20, 2010

Scant teachings about human 'soul'

When it comes to the Catholic Church, Rowan Hooper evidently writes with a proverbial chip on his shoulder, as in his June 13 Natural Selections column, "Synthetic life zaps 'the soul.' " He forgets that the Catholic Church consists of human beings and that there are as many opinions as there are human...
CULTURE / Books
Jun 20, 2010

Untangling the elusive past across time

The first 115 pages of Marie Mutsuki Mockett's debut novel, "Picking Bones From Ash," incredibly heightened my anticipation of a great, literary read. Then the crash came, splintering my expectations from the weight of disgruntlement.
CULTURE / Books
Jun 20, 2010

Pulp fiction raunch with a happy ending

Yoshihiro Tatsumi was, when young, a fan of Mickey Spillane, the poor man's — the very poor man's — Raymond Chandler, and Spillane's fingerprints are all over "Black Blizzard," a page-turner in the best pulp style, published in 1956.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jun 18, 2010

Lack of funds fail to stop Tokyo's young theater brigade

As a promising playwright, director and actor, 31-year-old Junichi Hirota highlights a cruel fact running through Japan's theater world — namely that once technicians such as lighting engineers, sound people and set-builders are paid from box-office profits, there's often little or nothing left for...

Longform

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