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COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Jun 28, 2005

Visa crackdown -- don't get burned

Last year The Japan Times ran an article entitled "Students pay price in visa crackdown" about Americans put through the wringer on minor infractions.
JAPAN
Jun 28, 2005

Koizumi nixes LDP postal amendments

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi rejected a request by his own Liberal Democratic Party on Monday to amend a set of bills now in the Diet that would privatize Japan Post, senior LDP members said.
CULTURE / TV & Streaming / CHANNEL SURF
Jun 26, 2005

Divorces among elderly couples the topic of TV Tokyo's "Monday Entertainment" and more

For as many reasons as there are old people, the number of divorces among elderly Japanese couples who had been married for many years rose steeply during the 1990s. However, in the last several years the number has leveled off. Apparently, the stabilization of the divorce rate of seniors has little...
Japan Times
Features
Jun 26, 2005

What price is heritage?

Landmark one day, parking lot the next -- that is the fate that seems about to befall an early 20th-century stone building in the heart of historic Shimoda, Shizuoka Prefecture.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jun 26, 2005

The Red emperor's new clothes

MAO, THE UNKNOWN STORY, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. Jonathan Cape, 2005, 814 pp., £25 (cloth). It is savagely ironic that just when China is viciously attacking Japan for trying to rewrite its history, here is a book that claims that the whole official history of the revered founding father of Communist...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jun 26, 2005

State, religion must not mix if Japan is to shed negative prewar legacies

Prime ministers must not visit Yasukuni Shrine if the constitutional principle of separation of state and religion is to be observed, according to an expert on Yasukuni issues at the University of Tokyo.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 26, 2005

Call them illegal, but they're also heroic

SANTA MARIA, Calif. -- "Being that you are an alleged expert in language, you should know the difference between legal and illegal," the reader stated in his e-mail, as he reacted angrily to one of my articles on immigration.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jun 26, 2005

Hokusai: From East to West and back again

HOKUSAI AND HIS AGE: Ukiyo-e Painting, Printmaking and Book Illustration in Late Edo Japan, edited by John T. Carpenter. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers/Hotei Publishing, 2005, 357 pp., 227 color & 126 b/w photos, $125 (cloth). The West first discovered the art of the Japanese woodblock print. Though popular...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Jun 26, 2005

Japan gets a life and finally drags its heels into Live 8

There used to be a common expression that money used to send men to the moon could better be spent on feeding people down here on Earth. As if in response, funding for space exploration was eventually cut and more money was channeled into so-called development aid, the ultimate aim of which, we were...
SOCCER / PREMIER REPORT
Jun 25, 2005

Agents continue making huge sums for doing very little work

LONDON -- The following story is, I promise, absolutely true, but you will understand why I have not used the names of the player, agent, club or manager concerned.
COMMENTARY / WASHINGTON UPDATE
Jun 25, 2005

No easy fix for reapportionment wrongs

WASHINGTON -- Among the issues that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will take to a special referendum election next fall is that of reapportionment. Specifically, the Gubernator wants to change the way California draws its district lines for representation in the state legislature and in the Congress....
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 24, 2005

Door wide open for resolving Korean nuclear issue

HONOLULU -- There is no country in Asia, indeed in the world, that behaves like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Since its founding more than a half century ago, the DPRK has pursued a different course, always troubling. For 13-15 years it has been the very center of Northeast Asian...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Jun 24, 2005

A prize catch for travel merchants

First impressions of a Japanese provincial town can be so thoroughly dispiriting as to make you inclined to believe that the developer of the station area set about his task grimly determined to bring a whole new meaning to the concept of drabness. And so it is upon alighting at Omi Hachiman Station...
JAPAN / A GENERATION CLOCKS OUT
Jun 23, 2005

Airlines face crunch as old pilots pull chocks

Japan's airline industry is facing a serious pilot shortage with scores of veteran captains expected to retire between 2007 and 2009 along with all the other baby boomers.
Japan Times
JAPAN / A GENERATION CLOCKS OUT
Jun 22, 2005

Manufacturers face mass reduction in skilled ranks

For manufacturers, the mass retirement of baby boomers will mean losing leagues of highly skilled workers still indispensable even in this age of automation and computerization.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jun 22, 2005

Teaching the world to sing in perfect harmony

When Kazufumi Miyazawa, vocalist of the Japanese rock band The Boom wrote the song titled "Shima-uta" about 15 years ago, no one imagined the path it would take, starting as a huge domestic hit and then gaining a life of its own abroad.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jun 22, 2005

Sacred sounds of Ainu tonkori resurrected

Keeping traditions alive is not easy; it's even harder when there is no one to teach them. When Ainu musician Oki recently re-created traditional tunes on the tonkori, the stringed instrument of the Ainu people, his only guides were pre-1970s recordings of tonkori music collected by ethnomusicologists...
CULTURE / Music / JAZZNICITY
Jun 19, 2005

Only one way to get that big band sound

Forming a jazz big band in this day and age is a somewhat insane undertaking. Scheduling the right musicians, writing elaborate arrangements and hiring a studio with the right equipment to record 16 players at once are headaches big enough to hold back even the most inspired leader. The bottom line for...
CULTURE / TV & Streaming / CHANNEL SURF
Jun 19, 2005

Veteran emcee Hiroshi Sekiguchi comes back with "The Shinso" on TV Tokyo and more

Several years ago, veteran emcee Hiroshi Sekiguchi hosted a variety show in which criminal cases, usually two or three decades old, were reviewed in detail. The names of the principals were changed, but the particulars of the cases were often familiar to viewers old enough to remember them. With the...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jun 19, 2005

The community in mind as a matter of practice

RITUAL PRACTICE IN MODERN JAPAN: Ordering Place, People, and Action, by Satsuki Kawano. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005, 152 pp., with b/w photos, $17.00 (paper). "Ritual" has meanings other than the primary dictionary definition, which insists upon the prescribed order of a religious ceremony...
CULTURE / Music
Jun 19, 2005

Only one way to get that big band sound

Forming a jazz big band in this day and age is a somewhat insane undertaking. Scheduling the right musicians, writing elaborate arrangements and hiring a studio with the right equipment to record 16 players at once are headaches big enough to hold back even the most inspired leader. The bottom line for...
Japan Times
Features
Jun 19, 2005

Filming rough

If you are a documentary filmmaker, one surefire way to impress viewers is to expose some aspect of your chosen subject that conventional reporting chooses to ignore.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Jun 18, 2005

Setsuko Ishii

"Art exists at the border between the ordinary and the extraordinary," Setsuko Ishii said. "Light is something that essentially cannot be bent, nor shaped, nor even held. Yet in holography light can be molded like clay, or woven like thread. Through holography I want to create a certain set of circumstances...
SOCCER / PREMIER REPORT
Jun 17, 2005

Alcohol continues to fuel Best's free fall toward tragic ending

LONDON -- When George Best was having problems with his first wife, Angie, I shared a flight back to England with him from Miami -- he was playing for the Fort Lauderdale Strikers in the North American Soccer League at the time.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Jun 17, 2005

Tribes: An African heart beats in Kagurazaka

Not so long ago, Kagurazaka was one of this city's most traditional neighborhoods, its alleys still echoing from the days when it was an important geisha district. Though some of its old character survives, these days it has much more of an international nature -- especially when it comes to dining out....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Jun 15, 2005

The art that rocks the boat of war in Iraq

If you don't like U.S. President George W. Bush -- particularly if you don't support his war in Iraq -- then there is a new gallery exhibition in Tokyo that you will relish.

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