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Japan Times
CULTURE / OTAKOOL
Sep 27, 2007

Akihabara's awful truths

While the Establishment packages Electric Town as a mecca for manga and anime obsessives, and a magnet for camera- toting tourists, the reality differs: 'Akiba' is alienating the geeks who once made it great
LIFE / Digital / IGADGET
Sep 26, 2007

Back-chatting TVs and translating photocopiers

Bridging the gaps between the multiple towers of Babel that are modern languages has traditionally relied on software. Whether this be organic software, as in humans and their linguistic skills, or computers with their still relatively primitive ability to translate from one language to another. Fuji...
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / ON: DESIGN
Sep 25, 2007

Tokujin Yoshioka, Nosign Design etc.

A drop of light
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital
Sep 19, 2007

Transformers: more than meets the ear

Since 1984, Transformers has proven an immensely enduring toy brand, spawning a hugely popular TV series (which in turn spawned even more spinoff TV series), a couple of movies and ever more toys, right up to the present day. In fact, the toys have their roots in the 1970s Japanese toy lines Microman...
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design
Sep 9, 2007

Yamamoto protege debuts stoic new line

While his daughter Limi prepares to present her Limi Feu line at the Paris collections for the first time in October, Yohji Yamamoto has selected another protege to take her place on the Tokyo runways.
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design
Sep 9, 2007

Fashionistas hold forth on a scene full of 'potential'

It seems that fashion weeks are the latest, well, fashion. They're everywhere — from Singapore to Sydney and Moscow to Mumbai, and that's not counting the "big four" seasonal collections in Paris, Milan, London and New York.
JAPAN
Sep 6, 2007

Anger brews over dubious social security system

confers with Social Insurance Agency consultant Kiyoshi Kawaguchi at an agency branch office last month. AP PHOTO
Japan Times
JAPAN / EXPLAINER
Sep 4, 2007

Japan's Shinto-Buddhist religious medley

Most in Japan may know Buddhism has something to do with controlling lust and anger, and is associated with funerals and graves, while Shinto involves venerating nature, and weddings. But many people have trouble making theological distinctions between the two or even telling a Buddhist temple from a...
CULTURE / Books
Sep 2, 2007

Transcending boundaries with writer Yoko Tawada

Facing the Bridge by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani. New York: New Directions, 2007, 186 pp., $14.95 (paper) WHERE EUROPE BEGINS by Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky and Yumi Selden, preface by Wim Wenders. New York: New Directions, 2007, 208 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 30, 2007

Immersed in playful worlds

Tokyo Opera City Gallery has one of the best art spaces in the city, and a program that ranks it with The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo near Kiyosumi in eastern Tokyo and the Mori Art Museum in Roppongi.
MORE SPORTS
Aug 25, 2007

Hammer king Murofushi eyes first world title

In Western culture, 13 is considered an unlucky number. For Koji Murofushi, Japan's maestro of the hammer throw, it's not a symbol of misfortune; it's a number that underscores one thing: his era of dominance.
BUSINESS
Aug 22, 2007

GE considers selling Lake credit unit

General Electric Co., the world's largest provider of private-label credit cards, said Tuesday it is considering the sale of its Japanese consumer-credit unit, Lake Co.
BASKETBALL / HOOP SCOOP
Aug 11, 2007

Albirex stand tall for Niigata

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.''
Japan Times
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Aug 10, 2007

Festival theater heats up Shibuya

Matsuri (festivals) in Japan are not only about fireworks, as the monthlong "Summer Summit 2007" drama event attests.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Aug 10, 2007

A playground by the sea

Naughty Atami is the Shizuoka resort with the beachfront soaplands and other salacious establishments. It's got the fraying Hihokan (literally: House of Secret Treasures), likely the world's least scholarly sex museum, with its holographic strippers and a Marilyn Monroe mannequin that exposes itself...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 9, 2007

The hidden treasures of Shikoku revealed in Ueno

Kotohira Shrine — popularly known as Konpira-san — is one of the main religious centers on the island of Shikoku. Until three bridges were built during recent decades to connect the island and the mainland — and ruin the previously magical scenery — Shikoku was remote and mysterious, a Shangri-La...
Japan Times
LIFE
Aug 5, 2007

Nuclear hell revisited

Two years ago, Michel Pomarede, a French journalist working for France Culture, a French national radio station, visited Japan for the first time. He came with the aim of making a mammoth, 17-hour program about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, to accompany the 60th-anniversary...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / WALKING THE WARDS
Aug 3, 2007

Home to the outsider

Western Taito Ward is a paradise for nonconformists who stray off the beaten track. Throughout the incense-scented alleys of Yanaka, and across the parklands of Ueno, it's hard to miss the area's preponderance of "strays"; tourists, artists and the homeless who, with a surprising number of cats, all...
Japan Times
LIFE
Jul 29, 2007

Kaiten zushi

It was a season of long days, heavy rain, loquats, hollyhocks and hydrangea.
EDITORIALS
Jul 27, 2007

Indicators of financial health

The Diet in the last session enacted a law designed to prevent bankruptcy of local governments like that of Yubari city in Hokkaido. The law became necessary because many local governments suffer from a similar deterioration of finances.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jul 27, 2007

Ready for the muddy mountain

Through her three solo albums and work with Peaches, Broken Social Scene and Chilly Gonzales, Leslie Feist (who releases records under her last name) has established herself as the soulful queen of Canadian indie rock. Her new album, "The Reminder," released this month in Japan, is a collection of bruising,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jul 26, 2007

And the beat goes on

Weatherbeaten and remote, the fishing port of Ogi hardly seems like a cultural magnet. Yet the unassuming little community on the southern peninsula of Niigata Prefecture's Sado Island has achieved worldwide renown as the site of Earth Celebration, a music festival with a twist.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jul 22, 2007

Welcome additions to the newest anthology of Japanese literature

The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From 1945 to the Present, edited by J. Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel, with additional selections by poetry editors Amy Vladeck Heinrich and Hiroaki Sato. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, 864 pp., $59.50 (cloth). Anthologists must consider...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 21, 2007

Court rules Chongryun property not tax-exempt

The Tokyo District Court rejected a lawsuit Friday filed by a limited partnership company operated by and on behalf of the pro-Pyongyang group Chongryun seeking exemption from fixed asset taxes on its headquarters and two other properties in Tokyo.
COMMENTARY
Jul 16, 2007

Miyazawa knew economics

Obituaries for former Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, who died recently at age 87, agreed that he was a statesman and a genuine internationalist. But some — those from Nikkei, Japan's leading economic media group, especially — also criticized him as a Keynesian economist responsible for Japan's economic...
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
Jul 15, 2007

Art's a beach!

The studio of potter Shigeaki Higuchi faces the Pacific on the coast at Shirahama in Minami Boso City. Between the shore and his modest atelier there's only a local road and a line of bushes where deep-blue morning glories were already in full bloom when I visited last month. The sky was clear and the...

Longform

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