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EDITORIALS
Feb 11, 2007

Exam system put to the test

When road signs point to universities, racks at shrines fill with rows of handwritten ema (votive pictures/messages), and a respectful hush falls over the city, you know it's time for one of Japan's most important rituals -- entrance exams.
EDITORIALS
Feb 10, 2007

Mr. Yanagisawa does it again

Language sometimes masks what one really thinks or feels. It also sometimes exposes what is really on one's mind, consciously or unconsciously. The second case appears to apply to the two statements health minister Hakuo Yanagisawa has made in relation to the nation's falling birth rate. In a Lower House...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Feb 10, 2007

Time custom-designed for that unique experience

It takes Charlie Spreckley no time at all to leave his apartment in Ebisu and meet at the station. He is tall, smiling, and very droll. Nicole Fall, his business partner, falls in not far behind, looking brisk and wearing wrist weights. "I've no time to go the gym these days. These help keep my upper...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 9, 2007

'The World's Fastest Indian'

One of the more intriguing things about Anthony Hopkins -- despite all his success and knighthood -- is that you get the feeling he's not really interested in reaping the benefits of stardom. That deep down, he's a classic workaholic who does the job for the sheer love of it and the trappings don't matter....
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 8, 2007

Bullying reflects problems in adult society

Disturbing incidents of bullying continue to make the news. We hear daily of the tragedy of children who, unable to endure the harassment and violence inflicted on them by peers and classmates, are driven to suicide.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 8, 2007

Brilliant choices reveal seldom seen masterpieces

Despite oft-heard subversive remarks to the contrary, the Japanese have a very highly-developed sense of humor -- it's just different, that's all. While Westerners are baffled by TV comedy shows here, or -- at a higher level -- traditional kyogen stage performances, Japanese will blink through a Monty...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Feb 6, 2007

Loneliness of the long-distance impresario

Stand-up comedy can be a surprisingly lonely profession at times.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle / ON THE BOOK TRAIL
Feb 6, 2007

"Looking for X," "Beauty Shop for Rent"

"Looking for X," Deborah Ellis, OUP; 2006; 138 pp.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 5, 2007

Close Europe's gender gap

NEW YORK -- Last spring, The Economist trumpeted "womanpower" as the driving force for the world economy. But if Europe's economy is to become more competitive and innovative, it is not enough that women enter the labor market in droves. To reap the full fruits of women's talents, they must be in more...
SOCCER / PREMIER REPORT
Feb 4, 2007

Upson saga illustrates how much power today's players have on transfers

LONDON -- West Ham United should beware after signing Matthew Upson from Birmingham City.
EDITORIALS
Feb 4, 2007

Overbearing education proposals

An interim report submitted by the Education Resuscitation Council to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is long on proposals designed to tackle various challenges in Japanese education but short on reasons why some problems have developed. Without in-depth background analysis, it will be difficult to find correct...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Feb 4, 2007

Whatever befell Japan's heady '60s hopes?

Over the past two weeks in this column, I have looked at Japanese society in the 1980s and '90s in order to trace how the nationalistic policies of the current Shinzo Abe administration, particularly in the educational and military spheres, are the outcome of developments in the preceding decades.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Feb 4, 2007

Thoughts behind the picture book

Ehon: The Artist And the Book in Japan, by Roger S. Keyes, foreword by Paul LeClerc. The New York Public Library in association with the University of Washington Press, 2006, 320 pp., 250 color illustrations, $50 (cloth) "Ehon" means "picture book," that is, a volume comprising pictures along with some...
CULTURE / Books
Feb 4, 2007

Drawing on some humorous animal characteristics

A JAPANESE MENAGERIE: Animal Pictures by Kawanabe Kyosai, by Rosina Buckland, Timothy Clark and Shigeru Oikawa. London: The British Museum Press, 2006, 112 pp., £16.99 (cloth) The Meiji Era artist Kawanabe Kyosai (1831-89) is said to have had his first memorable encounter with an animal as a little...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Feb 3, 2007

Patricia Hill

Patricia Hill says she is unused to looking backward. "But I see threads running through my life," she said. "I see my love of different sports and of flowers and gardens.
Japan Times
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Feb 2, 2007

Song, story and shamisen

The International House of Japan in Roppongi, Tokyo, will bring a 270-year-old genre of music to life when it presents "Song, Story and Shamisen: Tokiwazu and the Soul of Japanese Music" on Feb. 9. Tokiwazu, a type of music known mainly for providing the accompaniment to kabuki, dates from the mid-18th...
Japan Times
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Feb 2, 2007

Early works by Kitano, Kurosawa trace current J-film boom

Last year witnessed a boom in the Japanese film industry, with nearly 30 local films taking more than 1 billion yen at the box office. The trend doesn't look likely to end soon, either, with two much talked about films -- "Soredemo Boku wa Yattenai," directed by Masayuki Suo (who drew international attention...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Feb 2, 2007

'Dororo'

Big-budget period dramas, often set a millennium or more ago and based on a famous legend or historical incident, are the coin of the Asian coproduction realm.
JAPAN
Feb 2, 2007

'I Just Didn't Do It' questions court system

, who stars in "Soredemo Boku wa Yattenai" ("I Just Didn't Do It") and Masayuki Suo, the film's director, face reporters Thursday at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo. SETSUKO KAMIYA PHOTO
JAPAN
Feb 1, 2007

Abe to ministry: Find way to aid war-displaced

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Wednesday told seven members of a group of war-displaced Japanese that he has told the health ministry to look at new ways to help the roughly 2,500 resettled Chinese of Japanese descent who were left behind at the end of the war.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Feb 1, 2007

Pending retirees suddenly find, dote on wives

Mitsutoshi Fukatsu has been with his wife for three decades, but their lives have grown apart.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 1, 2007

Chamber doors that shimmer with gold

Uuntil the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Kyoto's Gosho Palace, a rectangular compound of approximately 110,000 sq. meters, housed Japan's Imperial Family for more than 1,000 years. The buildings have been destroyed by fire on a number of occasions, but were rebuilt each time exactly in the original ancient...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Jan 29, 2007

Same hot buttons a hundred years later

NEW YORK -- What was the world like 100 years ago? That was not the question I had in mind when I idly wondered if I could find exactly how French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) had described British playwright/novelist Oscar Wilde on one special occasion. As this is the age of the Internet, I quickly...
CULTURE / Books
Jan 28, 2007

From the truth comes some strange fiction

Homunculus by Hugh Paxton. Macmillan New Writing, 2005, 256 pp., £12.99 (paper). The grotesquely fanged monster armed with a spear and an assault rifle that comes hurtling out of a rising sun on the cover of "Homunculus" should be fair warning to readers that something a tad disturbing is to be found...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Jan 27, 2007

Never visit a Hokkaido home in the a.m.

Just when I thought I knew everything about Japanese toilets, I came to Hokkaido. Boy, do I have a lot to learn.

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