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CULTURE / Books
Dec 13, 2000

Television as a pillar of the state

BROADCASTING POLITICS IN JAPAN: NHK and Television News, by Ellis Krauss. Cornell University Press, 2000, 278 pp., $35 (cloth). Many of us know NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai) for its film documentaries, its cultural programs -- stunning or plodding, depending on your perspective -- or its Sunday morning singalongs....
JAPAN
Nov 24, 2000

Falsely accused seek system to make press clean up its act

After his nightmare summer of 1994, when the media branded him the prime suspect in the fatal sarin gas attack in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Yoshiyuki Kono embarked on a crusade to end press violations of citizens' rights.
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 22, 2000

Two countries, one system?

CAMBRIDGE, England -- Last week, Willy Wo-Lap Lam lost his job as the China correspondent on the South China Morning Post. That technically he resigned rather than be "promoted" to a non-China-related job is irrelevant, as it was clear that he was not going to be allowed to continue writing his weekly...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Nov 21, 2000

Glimpses of long-lost Tokyo

MY ASAKUSA: Coming of Age in Prewar Tokyo. A Memoir, by Sadako Sawamura, translated by Norman E. Stafford and Yasuhiro Kawamura, with an author's note and a foreword by Taichi Yamada. Boston/Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2000, 270 pp., $16.95 Sadako Sawamura was one of Japan's leading character actresses....
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Nov 12, 2000

Robert Whiting

For the last 50 years Japan has come under intense Western scrutiny from many quarters. Scholars, writers, professional men and women in different pursuits have contributed observations and analyses of Japanese thoughts and lifestyles and behavior. Bob Whiting crafted a way of his own to add to the body...
COMMENTARY
Nov 5, 2000

Mori administration reeling

The administration of Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori is in crisis, visibly weakened by the resignation of Chief Cabinet Secretary Hidenao Nakagawa over a drug-related extramarital affair.
JAPAN
Nov 1, 2000

Cabinet will not investigate Nakagawa, Fukuda says

The Cabinet has no plans to investigate allegations that former Chief Cabinet Secretary Hidenao Nakagawa leaked police information about a planned drug raid to his alleged mistress, his successor told the Diet Tuesday.
JAPAN
Oct 30, 2000

Opposition camp wants summons for Nakagawa

Opposition parties said Sunday they will demand former Chief Cabinet Secretary Hidenao Nakagawa be summoned to the Diet to respond to allegations that he leaked police information to his former mistress and is closely tied with a rightwing extremist.
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 29, 2000

Sexism remains a rampant social disease

I am fortunate to be able to count among my relatives a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter. Felix, appointed to the court by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was a cousin on my mother's side of the family and, needless to say, far removed from me in age.
JAPAN
Oct 27, 2000

Pressure mounts for Mori to dump top aide Nakagawa

Chief Cabinet Secretary Hidenao Nakagawa came under heavy fire Thursday over scandals involving a rightist figure and an extramarital affair, with some ruling bloc officials joining the opposition's calls for his resignation.
JAPAN
Oct 23, 2000

Vice governor complains over scuffle with photographer

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has sent a written complaint to Shinchosha Ltd., the publisher of the weekly photo magazine Focus, claiming a vice governor was injured during a scuffle ensuing from an attempt by the magazine to take a photograph of him, it was learned Sunday.
JAPAN
Oct 19, 2000

Nakagawa refuses to resign

Chief Cabinet Secretary Hidenao Nakagawa said Wednesday he will not resign over an allegedly false statement made to the Diet about his reported dubious links with a rightist figure.
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 14, 2000

Cambodian media: cowed and corrupt

PHNOM PENH -- They don't have to worry as much as before about getting shot on the street or having grenades thrown at their houses. But Cambodia's journalists still labor under a government that doesn't like dissent. And the country still has to put up with journalists who create problems for themselves...
JAPAN
Oct 13, 2000

Accounting practices blamed for slump in Japanese films

The chief executive of a Tokyo financial management company launched in late September hopes her new business saves Japanese films from a long slump.
JAPAN
Oct 12, 2000

New law means marching orders for bad tenants

Motokazu Miyama's big fear is one probably shared by hundreds of thousands of other property-owners in Japan: What if unwelcome tenants refuse to leave after the apartment lease expires?
LIFE / ALTERNATIVE LUXURIES
Oct 5, 2000

A dance of color, space and line

"Sometimes just to touch the ground is enough for me," says Wakako Oe with all the warmth of her plenteous years, "even if not a single plant grows in the garden."
JAPAN
Sep 26, 2000

U.S. teacher provides lesson for combating class collapse

William was an impatient junior high student in Karol DeFalco's Connecticut classroom, constantly bringing questions to her while she was in the middle of helping other students.
COMMENTARY
Sep 20, 2000

Council's proposals bode well

For an inside view on how Japan Inc. really operates, take a look at the workings of the National People's Council on Education Reform, now winding up its discussions and of which I was made a member, although I am not a Japanese national.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Sep 17, 2000

Ted Turner

CNN says that for 20 years it has been bringing you the world. As the world's first 24-hour news network, it signed on the air in June 1980 to 1.7 million cable households in the U.S. Since then it has gone on to notch up an impressive list of more firsts. Its news services around the world now reach...
COMMUNITY
Sep 1, 2000

Internet makes itself felt in publishing

Stephen King is currently shaking up American publishers with his experiment in making his novel "The Plant" available for downloading one chapter per month directly from his own Web site. In Japan, too, various ventures are taking place in digital publishing and distribution.
LIFE / Travel
Aug 23, 2000

A taste of life on the Mongolian steppe

We didn't speak a word of Mongolian, we knew no one in the country and we made no prebookings, but we befriended a family of nomadic Mongols living traditionally on the steppe as herders and discovered an idyllic way of life.
JAPAN
Aug 16, 2000

Phone firms not obligated to aid bugging

The government will not ask telephone companies to voluntarily participate in police wiretapping operations, Justice Minister Okiharu Yasuoka said Tuesday, the day that Japan's first-ever wiretapping law took effect.
CULTURE / Books
Aug 16, 2000

Meiji era portraits put a human face on history

ANGLO-JAPANESE CONNECTIONS: Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits III, edited by J.E. Hoare. Richmond, Surrey, England: Japan Library, Curzon Press Ltd., 1999, 397 pp., 45 British pounds. Most of the 27 portraits in this volume are of 19th-century characters. They are interesting, nonetheless;...
COMMUNITY
Aug 13, 2000

Women! Enhance your lifestyles with Webgrrls

Talking with American Khristine (Khris) Schaffner lowered the heat in Tokyo's Nishi-Shinjuku by several degrees. She has that kind of tall, willowy, pale blonde beauty that acts as a psychological cooler even if she is talking 10 to the dozen and making a complete fool of herself over a Starbucks chocolate...
CULTURE / Music
Aug 6, 2000

Bach Collegium Japan fetes anniversary year with passion

Bach Collegium Japan: July 28, Masaaki Suzuki conducting in Suntory Hall -- "Saint John Passion," BWV 245 (Johann Sebastian Bach, 1685-1750) featuring Gerd Tyrk, Stephan MacLeod, Chiyuki Urano, Midori Suzuki and Robin Blaze
LIFE / Digital
Aug 2, 2000

'Zine zone

www.failuremag.com The immediate image that came to mind upon hearing there's something out there called Failure Magazine was of four California college students getting stoned in a cramped dorm room, trying to figure out how to catch up with all their classmates' e-commerce sites. The light bulb dims...
JAPAN
Jul 30, 2000

Evolving Okubo strikes a balance

Okubo's image varies widely. To some people, it's a nasty urban jungle filled with sleaze. To others, it's a foreign world of fascination.
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Jul 29, 2000

Play revives old debate over Nazi A-bomb

"Absence of A-bomb: Were the Nazis duped -- or simply dumb?" So asks the weekly U.S. News & World Report in a piece for its July 24-31 cover story, "Mysteries of History." The question is being revisited now perhaps because of a recent Broadway import from London: Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen."
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 26, 2000

Swastikas under the onion domes

VLADIVOSTOK, Russia It is a muggy Wednesday afternoon in the nation's largest Pacific seaport, and as people meander home, a handful of men and boys position themselves around the central square, an asphalt plaza decorated with a monument to the communist revolutionaries who conquered the Far East.

Longform

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