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Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / BACKSTREET STORIES
Jan 31, 2010

Rags and riches by the Myoshoji

Few writers have been able to evoke the bare beams of poverty or the lambent lives of those who endure it with more dignity than Fumiko Hayashi (1903-1951).
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Jan 31, 2010

Groping pregnant women shouldn't be what's it about

On Jan. 14, 36-year-old comedian Sayaka Aoki made her last TV appearance before taking some time off to have a baby. The appearance was on Fuji TV's noontime variety show "Waratte Ii to mo" ("It's OK to laugh"), where she was a semiregular. The show's host, Tamori, placed his hands on Aoki's belly as...
JAPAN / Media
Jan 31, 2010

Study finds government support for media is rapidly shrinking

NEW YORK — Government subsidies for the media, which are not widely known but are a long-running source of revenue for publishers, are quietly vanishing just as the industry is struggling to remain commercially viable, according to a new report released Thursday.
JAPAN / Media
Jan 31, 2010

You're in the director's chair for a sci-fi that outlasts 'Avatar'

NEW YORK — Fans of "Avatar" rave about how immersive it is, but it has a problem: The film only lasts 161 minutes.
JAPAN
Jan 30, 2010

Hatoyama sets agenda in Diet

Drawing on Gandhi quotes for inspiration, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama called on his colleagues Friday to make 2010 "a new start for Japan" in his first administrative policy speech at the ordinary Diet session.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 30, 2010

Year of U.S.-China discord?

NEW YORK — In 2009, Forbes magazine named U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao the "world's most powerful people." In 2010, we will discover that neither has the power to keep U.S.-Chinese relations on track. That is bad news for those who believe that U.S.-China cooperation...
JAPAN
Jan 29, 2010

Guiding hand for Indonesian nurses

Cultural barriers faced by Indonesian nurses who come to this country to work are gradually being lowered, but the government has yet to help the Japanese hospital staff adapt, according to Keio University professors who recently launched an in-house training program to teach the employees how best to...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 29, 2010

'The Private Lives of Pippa Lee'

What exactly does a woman want? Even a genius like Freud couldn't answer that one, but that doesn't stop Hollywood from gleefully pitching their own answers, time and time again. Sadly, they're almost always something routine and familiar, dribbling with prosaic food-court banality: a man, a family,...
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink
Jan 29, 2010

Chocolate bars for whisky lovers

A tawny port pairs wonderfully with Stilton. Grand Marnier tastes great on vanilla ice cream. Chianti seems to suit a Margherita pizza. And whisky? Well, that goes with haggis.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 29, 2010

Blooming successes flower in artwork

East Asian flower-and-bird painting emerged as a genre in China around the 8th century and the tradition has survived through to the present. Its resonances for modern and contemporary Japanese artists are currently the theme of two very different exhibitions: "By the Water-lily Pond" at the Asahi Beer...
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / ON: DESIGN
Jan 28, 2010

Design for keeping everything warm and just so

Drastic desk changes Hopefully you're still keeping your New Year's resolutions, and if one of them was to pay more attention to the little things in life, such as your desk space, then the latest from Japanese stationery brand Craft Design Technology can help fulfill those good intentions. Released...
JAPAN
Jan 27, 2010

Bluefin ban could put Japan in bind

Seafood-loving Japan — having faced years of international pressure to stop whaling — finds itself with a potentially bigger fight over a highly prized type of tuna that conservation groups say is being fished to extinction.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 27, 2010

A Chinese champion of peace and freedom

PRAGUE — On this past Christmas Day, one of China's best-known human rights activists, the writer and university professor Liu Xiaobo, was condemned to 11 years in prison. Liu is one of the main drafters of Charter 08, a petition inspired by Czechoslovakia's Charter 77, calling on the Chinese government...
BUSINESS
Jan 27, 2010

Wary of deflation, BOJ maintains near-zero interest rate

The Bank of Japan said Tuesday it will keep its key interest rate unchanged at just above zero, as widely expected, and reiterated its determination to fight deflation.
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / IGADGET
Jan 27, 2010

Toshiba Blu-ray recorders, mCube90 make life more compact

Blu-ray recording: If you can't beat them, don't join them — just copy their ideas and improve them. Toshiba is endeavoring to do just that having abandoned its HD-DVD format and instead opted to craft versions of Sony's brainchild, Blu-ray. Nobody can accuse Toshiba of not doing a wholehearted about...
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 26, 2010

Cool head for the hottest issues

LONDON — Reading Barack Obama's "Dreams From My Father," the U.S. president's beautifully written reflections on his early life and identity, most people are struck by his cool and intellectual approach. This is not to say that he is unemotional. Obama can rage and weep. But he rarely seems to act...
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 26, 2010

Google walkout will expand the possibilities

NEW YORK — Usually, disclosure statements go at the end of an article, but let me start with mine. I sit on the board of Yandex, a Russian Internet search company with a roughly 60 percent market share in Russia, compared to Google's 20 percent or so.
COMMUNITY / Voices / HAVE YOUR SAY
Jan 26, 2010

Haiti dispatch; an ARK defense

Japan resident Nithiananthan Veeravagu is working in Haiti for the NGO Association of Medical Doctors of Asia (www.amdainternational.com):
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Jan 26, 2010

Judges fill the gaps in Japan's family law

First in a two-part series
BUSINESS / JAPANESE PERSPECTIVES
Jan 25, 2010

What if Clarke had embarked on an economic odyssey?

The movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," Arthur C. Clarke's epoch-making science fiction masterpiece, was first published in 1968. Its sequel "2010: Odyssey Two" came out in 1982. To put "2010" more precisely in its place, it was actually the first sequel among three. The ultimate resolution, if such it may...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jan 24, 2010

For all his failings, MacArthur was a fine precursor of Obama's bow

Two photographs, separated in time and context by 64 years, may symbolize, as well as anything can, the nature of the postwar Japanese-American alliance. Both in their time gave rise to uproar.
Japan Times
LIFE
Jan 24, 2010

'The wartime leaders of Japan were heroes'

General Toshio Tamogami, 61, was the chief of staff of Japan's Air Self-Defense Force between March 2007 and November 2008 despite having a history of lobbing verbal missiles at "leftists," China and Japan's so-called war-renouncing Constitution. In 2008, he pulled these and other themes together in...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Jan 24, 2010

A 'stable' life for Ozawa, yakuza, sumo stars

In the Jan. 25 issue of Aera, show-business reporter Yoshiko Matsumoto, writing about the persistence of image, related an anecdote about Seiji Maehara. The land minister was traveling coach on a domestic JAL flight and after the airplane landed he helped other passengers remove their belongings from...
Japan Times
LIFE
Jan 24, 2010

Secrets and lies

Japan marked the 50th anniversary of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty on Jan. 19 amid calls for an inquiry into the dispatch of Japanese Self-Defence Forces to Iraq, which critics say was illegal. But in contrast to the fierce debates over the origins and legitimacy of the 2003 Iraq invasion in both the...

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