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LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA
Feb 16, 2000

Real convenience

The big Net play in Japan these days is convenience stores. Name your neighborhood favorite and you can rest assured it has just rolled out some new e-commerce business scheme.
CULTURE / Art
Feb 4, 2000

Digital world bids farewell to Soseki

The Japanese press doesn't seem to have had quite the frenzy of millennium coverage that took place in America, but there were various attempts to look back at the recent past of Japanese literature and to forecast its future. I found two discussions in particular interesting for their contrasting viewpoints....
LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA
Jan 19, 2000

Space on the range

When the deliciously innovative iMacs were unveiled last year there was a collective gasp: What?! No floppy drive? How do I transfer files?
EDITORIALS
Jan 13, 2000

The next Internet revolution

The America Online-Time Warner merger is an eye-opener, and not just because it will create a $350 million corporate behemoth. The real significance of the deal, which must be approved by U.S. regulators, is that it promises to transform media in the United States and will trigger change in the rest...
BUSINESS
Jan 4, 2000

Domestic banks embrace information technology

Domestic banks, lagging behind their American counterparts in the use of information technology, are stepping up their Internet banking operations and expanding services available to retail customers via the Net.
LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA
Dec 15, 1999

Follow the money

Japan's back. After nearly a decade of economic stagnation, this country is getting its act together.
CULTURE / Music / MUSIC NOMAD
Dec 14, 1999

The Worldwide Music Expo embraces roots and Internet

For anyone involved in any aspect of world music, WOMEX (Worldwide Music Expo) has become an essential date on the calendar. After a few years of internal wrangling, at the end of October, WOMEX returned to its original home at the House of World Cultures in Berlin, Germany, where from now on it will...
LIFE / Travel
Dec 8, 1999

A life less ordinary: Anne Frank's legacy

Amsterdam must be the only European city whose most popular tourist attractions occupy different ends of the sliding scale that begins with virtue and ends with vice. It is likely that many of those who wait patiently in the queues that snake daily around the canal-side block where the Anne Frank Huis...
EDITORIALS
Oct 31, 1999

The end of a movie era

In this multimedia age, when new electronic entertainment devices for use in the privacy of one's home -- or anywhere -- proliferate endlessly, it can seem hopelessly old-fashioned to trendsetters to sit in a darkened movie theater watching stars emote in heart-tugging dramas, daredevil adventure stories...
JAPAN
Oct 20, 1999

Peugeot sets target; Mazda displays concepts

MAKUHARI, Chiba Pref. -- Automobiles Peugeot hopes to sell 10,000 units in Japan within the next two years and 20,000 units within the next five, Managing Director Frederic Saint-Geours said Wednesday.
LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA
Oct 13, 1999

Not just for kids anymore

I was never much of a video-game player, although I did have a brief infatuation with Missile Command. (It ended when a pal proceeded to stomp me every time we went head to head.) I must be one of the few: Video games are reckoned to be a $20 billion-a-year industry and revenues now outpace movie-ticket...
JAPAN
Aug 23, 1999

Internet station pulls in global FM tunes

Staff writer
CULTURE / Art
Jul 31, 1999

Putting art back into everyday life

The Kanazawa Citizen's Art Center belies the truth of the expression that you cannot put new wine into old skins.
CULTURE / Stage
Jun 19, 1999

Exploring tropical forests of poetry

Stephen Forster has released a new volume of poetry titled "The Good Mouth." In this collection of poems, Forster takes the reader on an imaginative journey to distant lands where conquistadors in tropical forests meet their savage doom, or to places where the omniscient voice of a child uttering the...
CULTURE / Music
Jun 10, 1999

Rockers get down for Tibet Freedom weekend

What do an 11th-century Tibetan saint and a member of one of the world's more popular hip-hop groups have in common?
LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA
Jun 2, 1999

But are you experienced?

Remember how online art used to be one of ballyhooed features of our new and improved lives on the Internet? We talked of visiting faraway museums, browsing rarely seen masterpieces, hyper-annotated with curatorial notes and historical contexts. Similarly enticing was the promise of new media and art...
COMMUNITY / How-tos / GETTING THINGS DONE
May 23, 1999

Whoever knows

A few columns ago I wrote about pen pals. A Japanese woman who had spent many years in the United States found readjustment to Japan difficult. She discovered she had little in common with her former Japanese friends; to them, she was a foreigner. Her American friends wanted to communicate by e-mail...
CULTURE / Books
May 13, 1999

Miyazawa comes to life for young English readers

GAUCHE THE CELLIST; SNOW CROSSING; THE STORY OF THE ZASHIKI BOKKO and Three Poems; THE RESTAURANT OF MANY ORDERS (4 vols. with four CDs and read-along booklet in English and Japanese), by Kenji Miyazawa, translated by Roger Pulvers, illustrated by Osamu Tsukasa. Tokyo: Labo Teaching Information Center,...
JAPAN
May 10, 1999

New publishers tackle demand for individual book orders

Staff writer
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 18, 1999

Silicone Valley clones lack the right stuff

All over Asia, governments are trying to replicate California's Silicon Valley. Each of the projects, so far, is a failure. The main reason for the failure is that Asian leaders have not yet realized that it takes more than a plot of land, an impressive budget, a graduating class of computer engineers...
CULTURE / Stage
Apr 2, 1999

Spellbound by Decoufle's grand illusion

Wit, magic and illusion took over the stage at Kanagawa Kenmin Hall on March 26-28 when Philippe Decoufle and his Compagnie D.C.A. closed the Contemporary Arts Series with "SHAZAM!" The opening filmed sequence of performers vanishing and reappearing through a series of frames, laid the tone of the piece:...
CULTURE / Stage
Mar 5, 1999

Stylistic zenith of wild flurries

Ryuichi Arisaka has perfected the choreography of the distraught. For his company Agua Gala, in collaboration with French artist Olivierde Schrynmakers, Arisaka created the piece "Industrial 03" which premiered Feb. 25-27 at the Japan Foundation Forum.
JAPAN
Mar 2, 1999

Intel launches Pentium III with controversial user ID

Intel Corp. launched its latest but controversial Pentium series microprocessor product Tuesday in Japan, as more than 30 system vendors including NEC Corp., Sony Corp. and Fujitsu Ltd. released Pentium III models the same day for the Japanese market.
JAPAN
Dec 11, 1998

Auto auctioneer way ahead of information highway

23rd in a series of occasional articles about venture businesses
JAPAN
Nov 25, 1998

Japan, China agree on joint info infrastructure study

Japan and China on Wednesday agreed to begin a joint study on developing an information infrastructure in China with Japanese technology, according to officials of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry.
JAPAN
Nov 12, 1998

KDD posts 5.8% dip in sales

Sales at Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co. fell to 144 billion yen on an unconsolidated basis in the first half of fiscal 1998, down 5.8 from the same period last year, the nation's biggest international telecommunications carrier announced Thursday.
JAPAN
Sep 3, 1998

Hitachi to post 100 billion yen loss, slash work force

Hitachi Ltd. will post pretax losses of 100 billion yen in the 1998 business year to next March 31, marking its first plunge into red ink for the postwar period, company officials announced in revised earnings forecasts Thursday.
JAPAN
Jun 2, 1998

Newspapers not doomed by Internet, Murdoch assures

Staff writer
JAPAN
May 8, 1998

Universal Studios unveils Japan construction plan

OSAKA -- Details of the Universal Studios Japan theme park were unveiled at a news conference Friday, with USJ officials announcing that construction would begin in October this year as scheduled, and expressing confidence in the handling of environmental problems that have come up.

Longform

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