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EDITORIALS
Sep 25, 2008

Alternatives to a dam

Once a large public works project is decided on, it is very hard to stop it because of political and bureaucratic inertia. But Kumamoto Gov. Ikuo Kabashima has called on the central government to cancel its plan to build a dam on the Kawabe River, a tributary of the Kuma River, known for its rapid and...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 25, 2008

Sri Lanka: isle of earthy delights

Although Sri Lanka has been long-renowned for its natural beauty, the art of the island seems to have been far less celebrated — or even studied — than that of other South Asian countries that share Theravada Buddhist culture, such as Burma or Cambodia. Though Sri Lanka was obviously greatly influenced...
CULTURE / Books
Sep 21, 2008

From Murakami's memoir to your own diary

WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel, London: Harvill Secker, 2008, 192 pp., £9.99 (cloth) MURAKAMI DIARY by Haruki Murakami, London: Vintage, 2008, 176 pp., £9.99 (paper)
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 18, 2008

Digital, rough and maybe deadly

Zaim is dirty. The floor is scuffed, the windows old, the building a strange maze of rooms with low ceilings. Compared to the slick show on a couple blocks away at this year's Yokohama Triennale, the exhibition space that used to be a government office building is beat-up and ready for trouble.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Sep 6, 2008

Land of the Great Pumpkin

The last time I went to Naoshima was in June of 2001, when it was just an island with a museum, a hotel and some tents. It was called Bunkamura (culture village). The museum was Mr. Fukutake's own private art collection of mostly modern art. In 2004 came Claude, Walter and James (Monet, De Maria, and...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 4, 2008

Katsura Funakoshi's sphinxes of suggestivity

The figure is nothing if not startling: Truncated just above the knees and suspended on four, bark-covered sticks sprouting from the body, sculptor Katsura Funakoshi's "The Sphinx Floats in Forest" is a muscular hermaphrodite with full, female breasts and male genitalia, an elongated neck and leather-strap...
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / IGADGET
Sep 3, 2008

Nikon offers first consumer DSLR with video capability

DSLR with video: Change is rarely as dramatic as it appears. In the world of camera makers, the digital onslaught has seen the rise of electronics firms such as Sony, Panasonic and Samsung, while that venerable creator of cameras Minolta has disappeared, sold to Sony.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Sep 2, 2008

Urawaza — quirky, everyday Japanese tips — head West

Two years ago, a mysterious 20-second video clip triggered some unexpected buzz on the Web site YouTube. In the segment, an ordinary-looking housewife draws an invisible line across the chest of a shirt with her finger. Then she pinches the shirt under the armpit and at the shoulder, does a quick flipping...
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 10, 2008

Russia's convertible icon

MOSCOW — Prophets, it is said, are supposed to be without honor in their homeland. Yet Moscow has just witnessed the extraordinary sight of Alexander Solzhenitsyn — the dissident and once-exiled author of the "Gulag Archipelago" and "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" receiving what amounts...
EDITORIALS
Aug 10, 2008

Death of a difficult man

Mr. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize winner, prophet and Russian nationalist, has died at the age of 89. Mr. Solzhenitsyn's life was marked by extraordinary adversity that he channeled into prolific writing. As is often the fate of such voices, he was alternately applauded and ignored, a source of...
Japan Times
BUSINESS / CABINET INTERVIEW
Aug 7, 2008

Tanigaki touts foreign tourism to boost economy

Attracting more foreign tourists can help offset the loss of economic vitality foreseen as the nation ages and the population declines, tourism minister Sadakazu Tanigaki said Monday.
EDITORIALS
Jul 20, 2008

Science fact or fiction?

Later this year, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is scheduled to go into operation outside Geneva, Switzerland. Scientists hope the LHC will enable them to better understand what happened when the universe was born. Some critics fear that the machine could trigger a catastrophe that ends life on Earth...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 19, 2008

The rising middle classes want their wheels

BEIJING — W hat becomes immediately apparent on entering the 10th annual Beijing car show is the emotional intensity with which China has thrown itself into its greatest consumerist passion to date: the first throes of an affair with the car. The entire nation, it turns out, is in love with them, is...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jul 18, 2008

Pop Levi goes slightly wrong

"It was a very obsessive thing," says Jonathan Pop Levi about the recording of his new album of warped pop music, "Never Never Love." "It took six days a week for 12 hours a day for four months to get it to sound that way. Especially in the vocals; if a computer could do a perfect impression of a human,...
Japan Times
Features
Jul 13, 2008

Top creators call for museums to save nation's modern heritage

What do industrial design, architecture, manga, anime, video games and traditional craft techniques have in common? Well, apart from each having spawned some of Japan's most popular cultural exports, the similarity is this: Japan has no national museums dedicated to their preservation, display and study....
Japan Times
Features
Jul 13, 2008

Japan's culture policy lingers in limbo

It's a fact that has long puzzled devotees and plain old tourists alike. Japan's manga and anime arts have been wowing the world for more than a decade, and yet the national government still hasn't got around to setting up a proper museum for their enjoyment, preservation and study.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jul 4, 2008

Fans raise $50,000 for Japanese band

To most bands, it sounds like a dream come true: $50,000 with no strings attached; the opportunity to record an album with one of the world's top engineers; and the freedom to make any kind of record you want, unhindered by interfering labels just waiting to drop you at the first sniff of commercial...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jun 25, 2008

'Beni' maker aims to revive rare lipstick

It's a traditional lip paint made from 1 percent beauty painstakingly polished to an iridescent shine.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / BACKSTREET STORIES
Jun 20, 2008

Sake and sculptures in an Aoyama backstreet

Tokyo's backstreets can be dank or swank, but on the whole, they're safe. The biggest risk lies in the lure of diversion. Wander off the beaten path on your way to buy eggs or mail a letter, and you'll get sucked in by bizarre Lilliputian entrepreneurships, copper-clad fronts of prewar wooden shacks,...
Japan Times
LIFE
Jun 8, 2008

Viva matsuri!

To commemorate 100 years of Japanese emigration to Brazil, and the countries' continuing close links, taiko drummers from both cultures will be powering a huge festival set for Sao Paulo on June 21
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jun 5, 2008

The trashy art of Asian diplomacy

When curator Mizuki Takahashi was selecting artists for the Japan Foundation-sponsored exhibition "Kita! Japanese Artists Meet Indonesia," held earlier this year in Indonesia, she deliberately chose ones "capable of involving local people and working in local environments."
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
May 24, 2008

Nature eases journey back to one's true self

In 2002, James Heartland found himself unexpectedly on Mount Shasta in northern California. There he fell into conversation with a young Japanese woman on a journey of her own.
Japan Times
JAPAN
May 17, 2008

Marriage sprang from struggle to master Japanese

May Uehara, who came to Japan from Hong Kong in 1986, speaks Japanese with such perfect intonation that people may at first mistake her for a native.

Longform

Construction takes place on the Takanawa Gateway Convention Center in Tokyo, slated to open in 2025.
A boom for business tourism in Japan?