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JAPAN
Jul 14, 2005

Government looks to seize loan shark assets for victim redress

The Justice Ministry may help out loan sharking victims by imposing penalties on and seizing the assets of loan sharks via criminal trials and channeling the money into victim compensation funds, government sources said Wednesday.
COMMUNITY
Jul 9, 2005

Humanitarian paints hope for students of Vietnam

Fred Harris looks around the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Yurakucho, central Tokyo, and observes with his usual keen but fond eye, "This was the first club I joined when I came here in 1964." (He was also in Japan while serving as a U.S. soldier during the Korean War.)
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / COUNTER CULTURE
Jul 8, 2005

YSL raises its flag again

In 1958, at the tender age of 21, Yves Saint Laurent took over the reins at the venerable couture house of Dior. From the outset hailed as a genius, then touted as no less than the savior of the French fashion industry, YSL is one of the world's most enduring fashion icons.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 5, 2005

Eastern Europe in the Far East

VLADIVOSTOK, Russia For generations of expatri ates in the days before jet travel, the first stop on the journey back to Europe from Japan was Vladivostok, Russia's easternmost city and the terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jul 3, 2005

Writers ask: Are you being served?

SAYING YES TO JAPAN: How Outsiders are Reviving a Trillion Dollar Services Market, by Tim Clark and Carl Kay. New York: Vertical, 2005. 175 pp., $14.95 (paper). Readers familiar with Japan are in danger of whiplash when reading this entertaining and informative book about Japan's services sector. Some...
BUSINESS
Jun 25, 2005

Forged credit cards in Japan account for 80% of leak losses

Forged credit cards based on those issued in Japan accounted for 80 percent of the fraud cases here linked to the massive card information leak in the U.S., according to card companies' data compiled Friday.
EDITORIALS
Jun 25, 2005

A mind to reduce waste

Two jointly announced government white papers -- one on the environment and the other on the establishment of a recycling society -- are the first such annual reports since the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty on global warming, went into effect in February following ratification by Russia in...
COMMENTARY
Jun 22, 2005

Private aid opportunities

NIAS ISLAND, Indonesia -- The flotsam of disaster was everywhere: trash, bricks, splintered wood, household effects, clothes, debris. Buildings by the ocean were mostly leveled. Across the road several structures survived, barely: Only their side walls, perpendicular to the water, still stood. Plastic...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jun 12, 2005

In Japan's tabloid world, truth trumps pulp fiction

TABLOID TOKYO: 101 Tales of Sex, Crime and the Bizarre from Japan's Wild Weeklies, by Geoff Botting, Ryann Connell, Michael Hoffman and Mark Schreiber. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2005, 255 pp., 1,400 yen (paper). Aside from the sight of middle-age Japanese businessmen happily reading comic books,...
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / COUNTER CULTURE
Jun 10, 2005

Black monolith rises in Harajuku

Tokyo is famed for its haphazard layout, with tatty old two-story structures nestling up against ultra-modern constructions, and areas seemingly designated for one type of business that are punctuated by anomalous residential or industrial premises.
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Jun 5, 2005

Misfits stand up, look to the stars -- or for some grub

The media and the popular arts thrive on synergy: Broadcasters and publishers play footsy with movie companies, record labels and talent agencies to keep the public drooling over whatever product or personality they're all selling at this particular moment. Synergy takes work, but sometimes it just happens...
COMMENTARY
Jun 4, 2005

EU elites missing the signals

LONDON -- The "no" vote that seems to have blown apart the whole European project is a crisis of the elites and institutions of Europe, not of the people. In fact, if the jubilant faces of many French people on Monday was a true signal, it might be taken as a triumph for the citizens against those elites,...
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / BEST BAR NONE
May 27, 2005

A rock 'n' roll heart

Rock 'n' roll will never die. The sound may have mutated with each passing generation to create a variety of strains: alternative, progressive, metal, punk, noise, grunge. But it's the same 4:4 beat that drives them all and syncs our pulse to the rhythm.
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / COUNTER CULTURE
May 20, 2005

Camping it up with style

Sexy, salacious and in your face, Dress Camp is an anomaly in the dour world of Tokyo fashion.
COMMUNITY
May 14, 2005

Extraordinary Ainu strut their stuff in Scotland

Val Aldridge is the researcher of the exhibition "The Extraordinary: A People Called Ainu," which opened at Scotland's Perth Museum and Art Gallery in April and will run through to the end of the year. It is hoped that it will generate some interest in July when the Group of Eight summit takes place...
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / VINELAND
May 13, 2005

To cut a long bottle short . . . Champagne gets it, samurai style

There is no sound more synonymous with celebration than the sharp pop of a Champagne cork. Professionals, of course, recommend easing the cork out slowly enough so that only a slight gasp is heard, which one waggish sommelier likened to "the sound of a contented woman."
EDITORIALS
May 2, 2005

Losing the war on terror?

The U.S. government has just released its annual report on terrorism, and it makes for grim reading. Equally troubling is the report's omissions: This year it does not give the specific number of terrorist attacks last year. Yet serious terrorist incidents are increasing, a finding that is even more...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
May 2, 2005

Coating the truth to make fiction

THE COAT THAT COVERS HIM AND OTHER STORIES, by Michael Hoffman. Authorhouse, 2004, 632 pp., 2,940 yen (paper). Japan, having contrived the image of itself as a manifestly gentle society, the spiritual home of garden gnomes and all that is cute and cuddly, is now awakening to a manifestly dysfunctional...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Apr 29, 2005

Shopping for the little bookworms

It's bedtime and you're keen for the little ones to get off to sleep so you can return to that DVD you left on pause. For their story, you try winging it again with a Japanese picture book, but the version you concoct this time is different to what you told them before. Pointing out that you've got the...
Japan Times
Features
Apr 24, 2005

Menswear to the rescue

The Fall 2005 season saw the Tokyo Collections in a sorry state.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Apr 24, 2005

Time for some Showa trivia and Heisei melodrama

GEISHA -- HARLOT -- STRANGLER -- STAR: A Woman, Sex & Morality in Modern Japan, by William Johnston. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, 245 pp., $29.50, (cloth). ISOLATION, by Christopher Belton. New York: Leisure Fiction, 2003, $6.99, 372 pp., (paper). To be honest, I've never really understood...
CULTURE / Music
Apr 17, 2005

Niyaz: "Niyaz"

The debut album by Niyaz is a delicious, intoxicating collection of songs, with a sound so fresh that it's impossible to reduce it to a particular genre. The band describes their sound as "21st-century folk music," and that's a start, but don't let that fool you: The rolling thunder of frame drums and...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Apr 13, 2005

Vision of a 'superflat' future

NEW YORK -- Murakami-mania hit New York last week as the "Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture" exhibition at the Japan Society opened to much media fanfare.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music / THE SECOND ROOM
Apr 8, 2005

Honest, Doc, I can still dance

I missed everything in the doctor's explanation of my condition after she used the "A" word.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Apr 5, 2005

Made in Japan

The Nintendo
JAPAN
Apr 2, 2005

ETC card users collide with barriers

About 1,500 vehicles with deactivated electronic toll-collection cards collided Friday with barriers at ETC booths on expressways nationwide because the drivers were unaware that one type of ETC card has become invalid, according to Japan Highway Public Corp.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / THEN AND NOW
Apr 1, 2005

Pining for things past

The accompanying 1830s woodcut print depicts Shirahige-jinja Shrine nestling in a pine grove beside the upper reaches of the Sumida River. In the center of the print is an embankment where pilgrims would descend the stone stairway on the left to a torii gate and then pray at the modest shrine to the...
Features
Mar 27, 2005

Mrs. Matsui

It was an open secret in my husband's course on modern Japanese literature at Radcliffe in the 1960s that his inspiration came not directly from the prose and poetry of Japan but from his absolute devotion to me.

Longform

Visitors walk past Sou Fujimoto's Grand Ring, which has been recognized as the largest wooden structure in the world.
Can a World Expo still matter? Japan is about to find out.