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COMMENTARY / World
Jul 23, 2005

Coming in from the cold

BRUSSELS -- In a vital move toward securing greater stability, North Korea announced last week it would return to the six-party talks in Beijing with the United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia to try to resolve the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula. The breakdown in negotiations had...
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / BEST BAR NONE
Jul 22, 2005

Do you want it soft or natural?

Aoyama is a breeding ground for night culture. It's as if someone dropped an extremely virulent strain of lounge-bar.alt in the area and it went berserk. Almost every time you round a corner, there's yet another stylish light-box sign marking the entrance of another chic new hideaway (some don't even...
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Jul 22, 2005

Female tips solicited to simplify appliances

Electrical equipment manufacturers, including Sony Corp. and Mitsubishi Electric Corp., are exploiting the female perspective on the design of household electrical appliances by appointing women to relevant workshops.
Japan Times
Reference / SO WHAT THE HECK IS THAT
Jul 21, 2005

Yutai-ken

Dear Alice,
JAPAN
Jul 21, 2005

Ministries to seek complete asbestos halt

The health and trade ministries will jointly ask 18 industry groups to stop all use of asbestos as soon as possible, sources said Wednesday.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Jul 21, 2005

Birds of no feather

It's a strange fact but true, that if you hike regularly in the Japanese mountains, you'll see some amazing sights -- and I don't mean just magnificent scenery.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 20, 2005

The Bard on the hanamichi

With his characters given samurai names and clad in kimono, whatever would the Bard make of this "Twelfth Night" by Japan's foremost Shakespeare dramatist, 69-year-old Yukio Ninagawa? This veteran theatrical explorer long vowed never to tackle kabuki, but is doing just that with "Twelfth Night" to packed...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 19, 2005

The most dangerous civilian job in Iraq

SANTA MARIA, Calif. -- In the translation world, the Italian phrase "traduttore, traditore" (translator, traitor) is used to suggest the inability to capture all the meaning in the original text and transfer it into another language because something inevitably gets lost in translation. Insurgents in...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jul 17, 2005

Is it a crime to want realism?

DRAGON'S EYE, by Andy Oakes. Overlook TP, 2005, 460 pp., $14.95 (paper). Eight horribly mutilated bodies are found chained together in Shanghai's Huangpu River. Four of the corpses, the autopsies reveal, turn out to be recently executed criminals; two others are European males; one appears to be an overseas...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jul 17, 2005

All hail the Land of the Free -- or else!

The United States of America is all akilter.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jul 17, 2005

There's nothing quite like a good Indian argument

THE ARGUMENTATIVE INDIAN: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity, by Amartya Sen. Penguin, 2005, 356 pp., £25 (cloth). "We do like to speak," admits Amartya Sen, citing a well-known fact about Indians in the opening paragraph of "The Argumentative Indian." But what the Nobel Prize-winning...
Japan Times
Features / WEEK 3
Jul 17, 2005

Dining where no solo woman dared

Reiko Yuyama believes that adventures are there to be had in daily life without having to go out into the wilderness. In that sense, she says she might be "more of an adventurer than Christopher Columbus or Naomi Uemura," the late, great Japanese explorer and climber who disappeared on Mount McKinley...
JAPAN
Jul 16, 2005

Narita to extend runway northward

Narita International Airport's "interim" 2,180-meter second runway will be extended to the north to its full length of 2,500 meters instead of to the south as originally planned because landowners refused to budge, the operator said Friday.
MORE SPORTS
Jul 15, 2005

Tomizawa tosses Japan past Hawaiian squad at Tokyo Dome

Yuichi Tomizawa threw a 25-yard touchdown pass to Takao Mizuguchi for the winning score with 1:34 to play Thursday, leading Team Japan to a 20-16 come-from-behind triumph over Team USA-Hawaii in the Japan-USA Bowl 2005.
JAPAN
Jul 14, 2005

Koizumi confident as postal bills hit last stage

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said Wednesday he is confident his contentious package of postal privatization bills won't be rejected by the House of Councilors and there will be no need to dissolve the House of Representatives.
COMMENTARY
Jul 14, 2005

Unraveling motives of terror

LONDON -- After months of careful planning, it has been the turn of London to suffer the carnage already familiar to the people of Madrid, Jakarta, Casablanca, Riyadh, Istanbul, New York (although not on the same scale) and many other world cities.
JAPAN
Jul 14, 2005

Lawyers stand firm, boycott refugee appeal hearings

A group of lawyers representing refugee applicants began boycotting appeals hearings Wednesday as promised, after the Justice Ministry's Immigration Bureau rejected their requests for greater information disclosure.
JAPAN
Jul 13, 2005

Rice again warns North

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday that upcoming six-party talks to end North Korea's nuclear threat will fail unless Pyongyang indicates it is willing to abandon its nuclear weapons.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jul 13, 2005

You've never seen anything so ancient Chinese like this in Tokyo

Tokyo's Mori Art Museum is currently hosting one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of Chinese artifacts that has ever been held in Japan. "China: Crossroads of Culture" is an incredible amalgam of treasures and art objects from the entire first millennium of Chinese history, beginning with pieces...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 13, 2005

Nepal backs Japan UNSC bid, but not G4

Nepal backs Japan's bid to become a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council but has yet to decide whether to support a resolution on UNSC expansion Tokyo jointly submitted with Germany, Brazil and India, visiting Nepalese Foreign Minister Ramesh Nath Pandey said.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Jul 13, 2005

Interesting times in China

Chinese contemporary art made a splash in the late 1990s with the so-called Mao Goes Pop movement, which broke big among Western gallerygoers and collectors.
COMMUNITY / LIFELINES
Jul 12, 2005

Food tips, bad bikers and buffets

Food for thought On the subject of foreign food in Japan, Mike writes in to recommend the Flying Pig ( www.theflyingpig.com ).
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Jul 12, 2005

A fight to the death

Her bony, 80-year-old body floating around inside a nylon shirt and cigarette permanently clamped between what appear to be her two remaining front teeth, Kan Kyon Nam is an unlikely illegal squatter.
COMMENTARY
Jul 12, 2005

A skittish reform pendulum

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's postal privatization bills cleared the Lower House on July 5 by only five votes, demonstrating the strength of anti-Koizumi forces in the governing Liberal Democratic Party. The narrow margin reflected severe criticism of not only the legislation but also Koizumi's...

Longform

Totopa in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward was picked by consultants TTNE as the best sauna of the year.
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