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Japan Times
JAPAN
Mar 13, 2013

Tokyo doctor adds disaster zone to practice

Ever since the 9-magnitude earthquake rocked the Tohoku region two years ago, Tokyo doctor Naoko Ishii and her husband, Hajime, have been quasi-residents of the Ogatsu district of Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture.
Japan Times
WORLD / Society
Mar 9, 2013

'Kony2012' and the fight for truth in the Internet age

A year ago, Jason Russell was a nobody. Not a nobody, precisely, but just ordinary. Normal. He was a healthy father of two, living in San Diego, and was happy in his work as a director for Invisible Children, a nonprofit organization he'd helped found.
SOCCER / PREMIER REPORT
Mar 9, 2013

Time for England to stop whining

"Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser."
JAPAN / TOHOKU TRAPPED IN TIME
Mar 8, 2013

A quick blow, then lingering death for devastated towns

One of the defining images from the Great East Japan Earthquake is of a tsunami-hit tourist bus stranded on the roof of the two-story community center in the Pacific coastal district of Ogatsu, Miyagi Prefecture.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink
Mar 8, 2013

Bite into the journals of a Japanese burger critic

Many Japanese foodies are enamored with the hamburger, in much the same way that their American counterparts are often besotted with ramen. The number of hamburger shops in Tokyo has exploded in the last decade, but there are also signs that the fascination runs deeper: There are books, magazines and...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Mar 3, 2013

A visit to Usa, the Japanese city that knows how to win

It is the time of the year when many people get nervous about winning and losing. Students are cramming hard to pass entrance exams to get into the high schools and colleges of their dreams.
Japan Times
WORLD
Mar 2, 2013

Remembering the day Napster set music free

In the first weeks of 2000 the founders of Napster were in their office above a bank in San Mateo, California, considering dizzying numbers. Figures scrawled on a whiteboard told how many people around the world had installed their file-sharing application and were using it to download music from each...
CULTURE / Film
Mar 1, 2013

Fifth Okinawa fest celebrates community films

Since its start in 2009, the Okinawa International Movie Festival has been more than its name implies. It has the usual competition sections: one called Laugh for comedies and another called Peace for dramas, though not all the films fit neatly into these two bins. But it has also been a promo event...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 1, 2013

'Su-chan Mai-chan Sawako-san'

Yonkoma manga, or four-cell gag comics, are popular here with both sexes and all ages, but they account for relatively few of the many hit live-action films made from manga. For one thing, it's not so easy to string all those gags together into a three-act story. Doable, yes. Done well? Not so often....
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / HOTELS & RESTAURANTS
Mar 1, 2013

Singapore food fair at Royal Park Hotel; Hyatt Regency's new buffet pastry creations

Singapore food fair at Royal Park
CULTURE / Film
Mar 1, 2013

'Haywire'

Director: Steven Soderbergh
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 27, 2013

Financial regulators' international variety show

It is hard to identify a correlation between regulatory structure and state success in heading off or responding to the financial crisis triggered in 2008.
LIFE / Digital
Feb 27, 2013

Wearable tech will see, follow us everywhere

Apple has already transformed two industries — music and computing. Now, as the company reportedly attempts the redefinition of the watch — one of man's oldest pieces of technology — the next phase of the techno revolution is moving into clear view: Welcome to the age of "wearable tech," with a...
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / TECH_JAPAN
Feb 20, 2013

Freeware has animators dancing to the Hatsune Miku beat

If you search for the acronym MMD on Niconico or YouTube — the two most popular video-sharing sites in Japan — the resulting list will have over 100,000 anime videos, most of which have 3-D anime-style girl characters singing and dancing to electronic J-pop music. What's surprising is that these...
Japan Times
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Feb 18, 2013

Can-can dancers, tea-time snacks and katakana confusion

In last month's column, I looked at the origins of several famous Japanese product brands. Thinking back, perhaps the very first brand I noticed here was a confectioner named 文明堂 (Bunmeido). The company, a 老舗 (shinise, well-established shop), was founded in Nagasaki in 1900, taking its name...
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
Feb 17, 2013

Tracing time's passing through faces of Tokyo

Petri Artturi Asikainen would regularly accost strangers in Tokyo, on the streets, in parks or bars and on trains. With a high-end Nikon D3 digital SLR in his hands, the lanky and bespectacled Finn would ask — somewhat timidly summoning one of the few Japanese phrases he had memorized: "Can I take...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 14, 2013

Breathing life into the forgotten and neglected

Painter Daisuke Fukunaga (b.1981) states: "If the world is the stage of a theater, I want to paint the bustle of the things waiting behind the blackout curtain rather than the heroine." His motifs are of things forgotten and neglected, but unlike his earlier works of 2007, which realistically depicted...
Japan Times
WORLD
Feb 11, 2013

'Good seed' versus 'evil weed': Hemp activists eye legalization

In the cannabis plant family, hemp is the good seed. Marijuana, the evil weed. Michael Bowman, a gregarious Colorado farmer who grows corn and wheat, has been working his contacts in Congress in an attempt to persuade lawmakers that hemp has been framed, unfairly lumped with the stuff people smoke to...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Feb 10, 2013

Winging along to marvel at Izumi's wintering cranes

My eyes have been carefully trained on the barren fields outside Izumi Crane Park Museum for at least 20 minutes, but I've yet to spot any of the locality's most famous feathered friends.
CULTURE / Art
Feb 7, 2013

'Hina Dolls and Their Accessories'

Hina Matsuri, Japan's annual girls day festival, became a particularly popular celebration during the Edo Period. As part of the festivities, girls are given a set of ornamental dolls, which are put on display from February through March 3 — a ritual believed to bring about good health for the girls....
BASKETBALL
Feb 4, 2013

Rizing hold off Cinq Reves

This season Rizing Fukuoka head coach Atsushi Kanazawa's message to his players has been consistent.
JAPAN / EXPLAINER
Jan 29, 2013

In Japan, gun control is the norm and discipline is rigid

The recent mass shootings in the United States have spurred the White House to pursue what many in the nation consider taboo: strict gun controls.
Japan Times
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Jan 28, 2013

What's in a Japanese name? More than you might expect

Last year I went to Yumenoshima Park in Tokyo's Koto Ward to see a museum housing the 第五福竜丸 (Dai-go Fukuryu Maru, aka No. 5 Lucky Dragon), the ill-fated fishing boat that inadvertently sailed too close to a 水爆実験 (suibaku jikken, thermonuclear test) at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands...
Japan Times
WORLD
Jan 26, 2013

Obama's chief of staff one of his oldest aides

President Barack Obama announced a reshuffling of his top White House personnel Friday, naming Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough as his new chief of staff and saying goodbye to longtime senior adviser David Plouffe, a key architect of his political strategy.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jan 25, 2013

'Minasan, Sayonara (See You Tomorrow, Everyone)'

Those directors who return to the same theme over and over commonly use the same actor to embody it. Akira Kurosawa cast Toshiro Mifune as the intense hero in film after film about masculine, if not always traditionally macho, heroism. Juzo Itami starred wife Nobuko Miyamoto as the tough cookie taking...

Longform

A man offers prayers at Hebikubo Shrine in Tokyo's Shinagawa Ward. The shrine is one of several across the country dedicated to the snake.
Shed your skin and reinvent yourself in the Year of the Snake