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Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE FOREIGN ELEMENT
Oct 21, 2013

Medical bills mount for 'fired' Tokyo English teacher fighting cancer and HIV

A British language school teacher in Tokyo is struggling to pay for his chemotherapy and cancer surgery after his Waseda University-linked former employer failed to renew his contract, citing his nonattendance due to illness.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Oct 16, 2013

'Edward II': The back story

Atheist, blasphemer, sodomite, spy, counterfeiter, lover of boys and tobacco — playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe has never been easily accepted into the comfortable canon of English literature.
EDITORIALS
Oct 13, 2013

The unraveler of colonialism

he life of Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, perhaps one of finest military strategists of the 20th century, is a reminder of how the spirit of independence can balance raw power.
Japan Times
WORLD
Oct 13, 2013

Medal of Honor seen as vindication for war hero

Four years after he survived a brutal firefight in a remote Afghanistan valley that claimed the lives of five Americans, retired U.S. Army Capt. William Swenson will be hailed as a hero at the White House on Tuesday.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Oct 11, 2013

A really long name — as long as the Mississippi

Small islands in the Seto Inland Sea such as mine are visited periodically by health care boats with doctors, nurses and medical equipment on board to offer health exams for islanders. The boat makes the rounds of all the small islands that belong to Okayama Prefecture, making it possible for even the...
Japan Times
CULTURE / CULTURE SMASH
Oct 8, 2013

Backlash against Miyazaki is generational

If you haven't lived in Japan, it's hard to appreciate just how beloved are anime maestro Hayao Miyazaki and his creative hub, Studio Ghibli.
COMMUNITY / Voices / COMMUNITY CHEST
Oct 7, 2013

Fukushima, suicide and nihongo fluency: readers' mails

A grab bag of readers' mail in response to recent Community articles.
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 6, 2013

The rich hit back at the poor

The economic divide between the haves and the have-nots may not be as wide in the United Kindom at it is in the United States, but it is growing dangerously.
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 6, 2013

Separating Jesus from the legends

There's enough biblical scholarship about the historical Jesus to raise questions about some of the myths that have formed around Him over the past 2,000 years.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Oct 5, 2013

Downtown comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto leans from TV to film

The Downtown comedy duo — comprising Hitoshi Matsumoto and Masatoshi Hamada — are sitting on a train speeding towards Narita Airport outside Tokyo. It's not like they're going anywhere, or doing anything, even — they're just sitting there and waiting for something to happen. "Something" in this...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Oct 5, 2013

Lahiri manages to finely balance the personal and political in second novel

The immigrant experience is always fertile ground for fiction, and Jhumpa Lahiri — born in London to Bengali parents and raised in Rhode Island — has built her literary career exploring this territory as it relates to characters of Indian origin in America, with all the attendant questions of identity,...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Oct 5, 2013

Is the honeymoon over for young, wedded bliss?

A visitor from another planet (a unisexual planet, let's say) would speedily infer that men and women are mutually hostile creatures. Marriage would puzzle her (the feminine pronoun is purely arbitrary) — all the more so if she stayed long enough to learn the language and hear how ancient and universal...
Reader Mail
Oct 2, 2013

Rights to our body after death

I usually enjoy Ted Rall's opinion essays, but I didn't fancy his Sept. 27 article "Mandatory organ donation." Even though he writes as he usually does, provocatively and tongue in cheek, there are serious people among us who seriously propose this dystopian stupidity.
JAPAN
Oct 1, 2013

WEF ranks Japan 15th in worker development

Japan ranks 15th among 122 countries in the World Economic Forum's first Human Capital Index report on countries' abilities to develop and deploy healthy, educated and able workers, the forum said Tuesday.
Japan Times
WORLD / Society
Sep 30, 2013

Russia anti-gay law casts shadow over Sochi Olympics

Let other mayors fret about potholes, taxes and sewers. This is an Olympic city, and here is the jeans-clad mayor striding into his office on a recent afternoon, fresh from a landslide, and not the electoral kind. When Sochi won the 2014 Games, life went epic.
Japan Times
BUSINESS / Economy
Sep 29, 2013

American Dream fading for many in wake of financial crisis

Four years into an economic recovery in which most of the benefits have flowed to the top earners, a majority believes that the American Dream is becoming markedly more elusive, according to the results of a Washington Post-Miller Center poll exploring Americans' changing definition of success and their...
Japan Times
LIFE
Sep 28, 2013

Camera artist casts new light on Jomon millennia

The Jomon Period of Japanese history is so shrouded in the mists of time that any bid to fathom its secrets stretches even the usual bounds of prehistoric archeology. Yet as amateurs and experts alike have continued unearthing examples of Jomon pottery and stone tools for more than a century, the pieces of the puzzle are gradually coming together.
Japan Times
WORLD
Sep 27, 2013

The violent, thuggish world of the young Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach is arguably the greatest of all composers, with the "St. Matthew Passion" and the "Mass in B Minor" among the most sublime masterpieces in classical music. But biographers over the past half century have "sanitised" his life, in the belief that only a saintly man could have written...
Japan Times
WORLD
Sep 27, 2013

Lord Byron to Russell Brand: timeless appeal of the bad boy

When the singer Katy Perry spoke recently about her relationship with British comedian Russell Brand, not so long after their whirlwind courtship and immediately after their whirlwind divorce, she refrained from putting the boot in, despite Brand having ended the short marriage by text.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 27, 2013

'There will be people who walk out of the cinema, I'm sure'

In a drab building in central Scotland, one afternoon in the armpit of winter, an actor who looks a lot like nice-guy James McAvoy is persuading a room full of blokes to — I'm paraphrasing here — Xerox their cocks.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 26, 2013

Suede plays it anew with 'Bloodsports' album

Ten years ago, Suede was in the process of fizzling out to a backdrop of apathy. For a band whose initial brilliance inadvertently help kick-start Britpop in the 1990s, it all seemed unedifying.
Japan Times
WORLD / Crime & Legal
Sep 24, 2013

Pussy Riot member on hunger strike

In the Soviet era, female political prisoners who were sent to labor in Russia's Mordovia region described their privations in tiny words written on cigarette papers, which took months to reach the world. Today, an inmate can hand a real letter to a husband, and it is posted on a blog, emblazoned on...
COMMUNITY / Voices / HOTLINE TO NAGATACHO
Sep 23, 2013

Why are so many Nepalese in Japan taking their own lives?

Dear Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Minister of Education Hakubun Shimomura and Minister of Health, Labor and Welfare Norihisa Tamura,
Japan Times
CULTURE / Entertainment news
Sep 22, 2013

Pacman, Peso and Pyongyang

A few weeks ago, a Kickstarter project was posted on the Internet featuring two young men who went by the names of Pacman and Peso.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Sep 21, 2013

Crossing the Himalayas through memory to Ladakh

I'm in a small van careering along a rough and narrow road beside a rushing river with brightly painted temples along its banks and craggy peaks towering overhead. We're traveling in the prescribed Indian fashion — drive as fast as you can and hope for the best or, better still, pray.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 18, 2013

'Sengai and the World of Zen'

During his life as a monk, Sengai Gibon (1750-1837) was admired for not only his artistic ability but also his modesty and simplistic way of life. Despite his social status, he chose to don an everyday black robe instead of one of distinguished purple silk, and his beliefs were reflected in what is now...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 12, 2013

'Hyde Park on Hudson'

For all intents and purposes, "Hyde Park on Hudson" should have you on hello. Instead, it may leave you feeling the tiniest bit revolted. Focusing on the events of a weekend in the life of 32nd U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, arguably the best-loved commander-in-chief of the 20th century after...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Sep 12, 2013

Photographer 'faces future' with portraits of centenarians

The idea of getting old scares most of us. We don't want to think about getting wrinkles, becoming bedridden or succumbing to Alzheimer's disease. Still, we must come to terms with the fact that growing old is a reality for all of us lucky enough to live long lives.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Sep 7, 2013

Ballet prodigy gets a big lift from mom

Sixteen-year old ballerina Miko Fogarty may be an American teen prodigy, but despite hailing from that land steeped in stardom culture, she seems to have none of the usual celebrity trappings — or to be particularly interested in them.

Longform

Totopa in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward was picked by consultants TTNE as the best sauna of the year.
Japan’s sauna movement: Relax, refresh, repeat