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COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
May 16, 2009

Bridge to nowhere

I admit I like taking a boat to work. I used to sail to the mainland when I was working at the university but nowadays I'm too busy for the two-hour sail to the mainland. These days when I go off the island, I take the 40-minute ferry.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
May 15, 2009

Deerhunter

Bradford Cox, frontman for Atlanta, Georgia's, self-styled "ambient punks" Deerhunter, tends to attract attention.
Japan Times
JAPAN / CITIZEN JUSTICE
May 15, 2009

Media fret risk of biasing lay judges

Fourth in a series
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 15, 2009

'Angels & Demons'

How much work can you get done in five hours? That's the crucial question in "Angels & Demons," the sequel to the 2006 global megahit "The Da Vinci Code."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / ART BRIEF
May 15, 2009

"Tetsuya Umeda: Science of Superstition"

Ota Fine Arts
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 15, 2009

A new spirit for tea traditions

In the rarefied world of Japanese tea ceremony, innovations have often been greeted coolly. When the Japanese-American abstract sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-88) gave a tea kettle of his own making to the landscape designer and tea connoisseur Mirei Shigemori (1896-75), the recipient was baffled.
BUSINESS
May 14, 2009

Failures up 9% as credit stays tight

Corporate bankruptcies rose for the 11th month in a row in April as companies struggled to obtain funds, indicating unemployment may increase.
BASKETBALL / NBA / NBA REPORT
May 13, 2009

Fond farewell visit for Daly, coaching buddies

NEW YORK — Several weeks after Chuck Daly was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer on Feb. 9, Jack McCloskey, Don Casey, Bob Weinhauer and Bob Staak, whose coaching careers were knotted at the high school and college level in the Philadelphia-New Jersey area , arrived in Jupiter, Fla., to see...
JAPAN / CITIZEN JUSTICE
May 13, 2009

Preparation for quicker criminal trials enhances focus

Second in a series
COMMUNITY / Voices / HOTLINE TO NAGATACHO
May 12, 2009

Kusanagi romp makes waves as real crimes go unpunished

Dear Tokyo Metropolitan Police,
Reader Mail
May 10, 2009

Washing with soap has benefits

For all the talk about preventing the spread of influenza, Japan has not learned the lessons of SARS. The other day, after taking a train, I went to the washroom in a JR station. As always, there was no soap. Telling people to wash their hands won't do much good until soap is in common use.
COMMENTARY / World
May 10, 2009

Petty torture rules played on sense of duty

PARIS — The top-secret memorandums released by the Obama administration concerning torture practices in CIA prisons shed new light on a fundamental question: How is it that people acting in the name of the United States government could so easily accept the idea of torturing detainees in their charge?...
LIFE
May 10, 2009

Toilet trend gets political correctness down to a 'p'

Nothing reflects the balance of power between the sexes quite like toilet politics.
Japan Times
LIFE
May 10, 2009

Blurring the boundaries

Every society has its own terminology for a young generation regarded as odd or unfathomable, and marketers are quick to give them catchy labels. It's no exception in Japan, which is now abuzz with talk of men with a soft spot who are becoming known as soshokukei, meaning "herbivorous" or "herbivores."...
EDITORIALS
May 10, 2009

World press freedom

In the middle of the Golden Week Holidays, newspapers around the world recognized their own special day on May 3: World Press Freedom Day. Officially established in 1993 by the U.N. General Assembly and organized annually by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), the day offers an annual report on...
CULTURE / Books
May 10, 2009

Continuing controversy of 'comfort women'

C. Sarah Soh explains how the comfort women system emerged from the nexus of patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism and militarism, placing it in an ongoing continuum of women's subjugation and exploitation. Controversially, she asserts that it is inaccurate to depict the comfort women as sex slaves and...
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
May 10, 2009

Swine flu highlights pig industry's fatal flaw

As office workers all over Japan tuck into their lunchtime katsudon (pork cutlet with rice), I'm sure many of them joke about the H1N1 swine flu that threatened to become a pandemic (an epidemic affecting a large region). At the time of writing, the World Health Organization hasn't classed it as a pandemic;...
SOCCER / PREMIER REPORT
May 9, 2009

Chelsea again incapable of accepting defeat

LONDON — It should have been no surprise that Chelsea accepted its Champions League knockout by Barcelona with all the grace of a pack of hyenas.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
May 8, 2009

The Bawdies

More than 25 years ago, ZZ Top sang, "They come running just as fast as they can, because every girl's crazy about a sharp-dressed man." Looking quite dapper in matching suits and ties, The Bawdies will see if this still holds true as the Tokyo outfit attempts to pack clubs with hordes of screaming ladies...
LIFE / Food & Drink
May 8, 2009

Sweet wines starting to trickle out of Romania

Since ancient times, wave upon wave of foreign conquests have washed over Romania, changing — sometimes obliterating — parts of the region's cultural identity.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 8, 2009

'Yomei Ikkagetsu no Hanayome'

Films commonly target one sex more than the other. Akira Kurosawa made them mainly for men and Yasujiro Ozu, mainly for women, but today both directors are regarded as masters by critics of both sexes, targeting be damned.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 8, 2009

'W.'

Some things don't require a lot of explanation. If I were to tell you I was planning a barbecue in my kitchen, filled my sink with kerosene and reached for a lighter, you wouldn't need to stick around to guess what happens.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 8, 2009

Issey Miyake's "U-Tsu-Wa" filled with character and inspiration

In Japanese, the word utsuwa literally means "vessel" or "container," but it can also be used to describe a person's character. Someone said to have a "large utsuwa" ("utsuwa ga ookii") is a person of high caliber or someone with tremendous capacity or generosity. When celebrated Japanese fashion designer...
Japan Times
JAPAN
May 6, 2009

Calls to revise organ law grow as lawmakers debate various plans

When Yasuto Katagiri asked New York's Columbia University in February to perform a heart transplant on Hoku, his 2-year-old son suffering from a rare form of heart disease called restrictive cardiomyopathy, the university had to turn him down because its 5 percent limit for accepting foreign transplant...
COMMENTARY
May 6, 2009

China and Taiwan try a practical approach

LOS ANGELES — On the surface of things, it might not seem like such a big deal. Taiwan is to get recognition as an observer at an important world health meeting in Geneva to be held later this month. But in the context of Asian diplomatic history, it is a big deal.

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