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CULTURE / Music / FUZZY LOGIC
Jul 6, 1999

How to get your teenage kicks in the 'teahouses' of Tokyo

I'm not one to hang around kiddies' playgrounds (honestly!), but when I strolled into Shimokitazawa's Shelter last week I was instantly teleported into a school disco, and it kinda felt good. But keep that to yourself, OK.
JAPAN
Jul 5, 1999

Ambassador gives India's side of Kashmir story

India is ready to talk only after Pakistan withdraws its troops from Kashmir, Indian Ambassador to Japan Siddharth Singh said Monday.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 4, 1999

A paler shade of Green hurts Germany

The German Green party is in the midst of a major identity crisis -- struggling between the ideals that have been the motor of its very existence and the pragmatism required of a junior coalition partner of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's (barely) left of center government. A new generation of Greens,...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 4, 1999

Promise of autonomy fades in Hong Kong

HONG KONG -- Right from the start, the current legal and political case concerning "right of abode" in Hong Kong has been a journalist's nightmare. Highly complex, profoundly nuanced, and containing contradictory strands, the case was impervious to easy simplification. Both sides to the dispute could...
COMMUNITY / How-tos / GETTING THINGS DONE
Jul 4, 1999

Happy holiday

The U.S. celebration of independence does not always fall on a column day and even when it does, I rarely write about it. There are some 153 diplomatic missions represented in Tokyo and they all have national days that could be noted. But then, once in a while I do. Once I wrote how Japan had honored...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 1, 1999

East Timorese exile recounts the horrors of Indonesia's quarter-century occupation

Special to The Japan Times When Bella Galhos packed up her Indonesian military youth-corps uniform and shipped it off to the Indonesian government from Canada, she was saying goodbye to a dangerous double life and was beginning her crusade to inform people about a genocide that has largely been hidden...
JAPAN
Jul 1, 1999

Palau proposes capital city ties

Staff writer
JAPAN
Jul 1, 1999

Telecom Realignment: Will breakup fuel competition?

Fourth in a series
LIFE / Style & Design / BEAUTY EAST AND WEST
Jul 1, 1999

Be prepared to relax on summer break

It's summer, that getaway time of year when we are allowed a bit of an escape from it all. It is the time we want a break, relaxation of the deepest sort, freedom from everything by which we are ordinarily burdened. Not that I foresee any holiday for myself in the near future, but it is precisely the...
CULTURE / Books
Jun 29, 1999

American haiku now holds its own

THE HAIKU ANTHOLOGY, by Cor van den Heuvel. W. W. Norton, pp. 363, $27.50. Cor van den Heuvel is the most important anthologist of haiku composed in English in North America. He has published three collections, all simply called "The Haiku Anthology" and all through prominent commercial houses: Doubleday,...
JAPAN
Jun 28, 1999

Base not Ishihara's only target

Staff writers
CULTURE / Film
Jun 25, 1999

Lost opportunity of the disco daze

If there were ever a high-water mark of hedonism, it would have to have been located at some New York or L.A. disco in the late '70s. In this pre-AIDS, post-Pill era of guilt-free sex, drug use was widespread and largely tolerated, gay culture was coming out of the closet and sexual mores were loosening...
JAPAN
Jun 24, 1999

Akashi to make visit to North Korea

Yasushi Akashi, a former United Nations undersecretary general, will make a four-day visit to North Korea beginning Tuesday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiromu Nonaka said Thursday.
JAPAN
Jun 24, 1999

Recession not sole cause of suicide

All Daisuke Tajima could think about was ending it all. One day the 49-year-old salaried worker walked out of his office in a city in northern Japan, and for weeks his family had no clue as to his whereabouts.
LIFE / Travel
Jun 23, 1999

Vices and virtues of Pompeii exposed

Imagine if an entire town could disappear yet be preserved intact, sealed timeless in eternity. Then imagine that surprised excavators nearly 1,700 years later uncover this natural time capsule to reveal what life was really like in the ancient world.
ENVIRONMENT / GARDENING FOR ALL
Jun 23, 1999

Sapporo garden faces climatic challenge

Sapporo Municipal Botanic Garden, better known as Toyohira Garden, is well off the tourist trail, but highly recommended. The garden is situated in Toyohira-ku, approximately 3 km south of Sapporo Station, just across the wide Toyohira River.
JAPAN
Jun 22, 1999

Miyazawa puts official spin on BOJ dollar-buying

Monetary authorities were not trying to prop up exports in their repeated sales of yen for dollars in the past few weeks, Finance Minister Kiichi Miyazawa said Tuesday.
JAPAN
Jun 21, 1999

Norway ambassador leaves satisfied after five-year term

John Bjornebye, who is leaving for Oslo today after nearly five years in Tokyo as the Norwegian ambassador, expressed satisfaction that the two countries' relations have become more globally oriented.
JAPAN
Jun 21, 1999

Stricter dioxin standard urged for biggest industrial emitter

The government should drop the maximum tolerable daily intake of dioxin to 4 picograms per kilogram of body weight, a government advisory panel said in a report released Monday.
EDITORIALS
Jun 20, 1999

Fast, faster and fastest

Last week, sprinter Koji Ito, Japan's fastest man, became the first Asian to run 100 meters in less than 10 seconds. Performing at a college meet in Hiratsuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, Mr. Ito was timed with a stopwatch at 9.90 seconds; his achievement will only be unofficial, however, since the Japan Amateur...
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...
JAPAN
Jun 18, 1999

13% of Japanese tapped into Internet in '98

More and more Japanese are using the Internet, with the number reaching about 17 million, or 13.4 percent of the population, in fiscal 1998, according to the 1999 White Paper on Communications in Japan released Friday.
JAPAN
Jun 17, 1999

Prudential to step into Japanese pension market

Staff writer
JAPAN
Jun 17, 1999

War currency need not be honored, court rules

The Tokyo District Court on Thursday rejected reimbursement and compensation demands by 17 Hong Kong residents who had been forced during World War II to exchange their money for Japanese military currency, which became worthless when the war ended.
JAPAN
Jun 16, 1999

Offices offered for use by the out-of-work

OSAKA — It looks like a normal office — desks and chairs, personal computers and telephones, business magazines in a corner magazine rack.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 12, 1999

Restrain Japan, contain India

The main objective of China's Asia policy has always been to prevent the rise of an Asian rival or peer competitor to challenge its status as the Asia-Pacific's sole "Middle Kingdom." As an old Chinese saying goes, "'One mountain cannot accommodate two tigers."
JAPAN
Jun 10, 1999

Analysis: Lofty administrative goals not attained by bills

It has been said that the two sets of administrative reform bills moving on to the Upper House will bring about Japan's most sweeping reforms in 100 years and end the bureaucracy's dominance over the administration.
JAPAN
Jun 10, 1999

Edo freighter replica to be tested in Osaka Bay

OSAKA — A replica of an Edo Period cargo vessel is nearly complete and will be tested in Osaka Bay early next month, according to city officials.
JAPAN
Jun 9, 1999

Ready for 2000?: Line-by-line repairs not enough, expert says

Last in an occasional series on Japan's Y2K preparedness
JAPAN
Jun 9, 1999

C&W wins IDC stakes

Toyota Motor Corp. and Itochu Corp. on Wednesday announced their decisions to sell their 17.7 percent stakes in International Digital Communications Inc. to Britain's Cable and Wireless PLC.

Longform

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