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COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Jul 28, 2012

The buzz about cicadas

Japan is entering cicada season, so let me start with a modest observation:
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 20, 2012

'Okami Kodomo no Ame to Yuki (Wolf Children)'

Mamoru Hosoda is a leading contender to succeed Hayao Miyazaki for the title of anime master of masters — the one everyone in the industry, Japanese or foreign, looks up to and steals from.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jul 20, 2012

Yoshitomo Nara puts the heart back in art

The induction of manga-style painting into Japan's contemporary art canon over the last 15 years can be put down to the work of not one but two artists. Sure, it was Takashi Murakami who laid the theoretical foundations, spelling out links with classical painting and ukiyo-e prints. But it was another...
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Jul 17, 2012

Global demand for nuclear power remains high

Despite the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster that hit Japan last year, the global appetite for nuclear energy remains largely unchanged as emerging economic powers are set to account for much of the growth in worldwide electricity demand in the coming decades, a U.S. think tank expert said at a...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Jul 14, 2012

Why we came to Japan — a different realm

"Why did you come to Japan?" We've all been asked this question. I still can't give a good answer.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 13, 2012

High price of the most gorgeous show in town

Note to self: Never be a young woman in Japan. It's just too harrowing.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 13, 2012

'The Lady' / 'Betty Blue'

In cinema, as in music, micro-trends come and go: Will anyone remember "mumblecore" a decade from now? Yet the '80s French movement known as le cinema du look, based on three brash young French directors, has aged remarkably well. Jean-Jacques Beineix ("Diva"), Luc Besson ("Subway"), and Leos Carax ("Mauvais...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHO'S WHO
Jul 10, 2012

Scholar urges fresh look at rich Ainu heritage

Shunwa Honda, a renowned scholar of indigenous ethnic groups, emphasizes that the Japanese people need to create a stage for the nation's indigenous Ainu, who "still suffer from not having their voices heard properly in society."
EDITORIALS
Jul 10, 2012

The health of America

Health care reforms put forward by U.S. President Barack Obama have passed constitutional scrutiny. In an anxiously awaited, bitterly divided 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the week before last that the bulk of the bill, put into law in 2010, can go into effect.
Japan Times
LIFE
Jul 8, 2012

Okinawa's first nuclear missile men break silence

In October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of nuclear war after American spy planes discovered that the Kremlin had stationed medium-range atomic missiles on the communist island of Cuba in the Caribbean, barely over the horizon from Florida.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 6, 2012

Director Nobuhiro Yamashita's commercial film departure

Starting with his first film "Donten Seikatsu (Hazy Life)" from 1999, director Nobuhiro Yamashita explored slackerdom, Japan-style, with a laconically knowing eye and a laidback sense of humor. Rejecting the broad approach of so much local comedy, he developed gags from off-beat, spot-on observations...
COMMUNITY / Voices / HAVE YOUR SAY
Jul 3, 2012

Strong winds linger from the microaggressions tempest

Readers' responses to Debito Arudou's May 1 Just Be Cause column, "Yes, I can use chopsticks: the everyday 'microaggressions' that grind us down," his followup June 5 JBC column, "Guestists, Haters, the Vested: Apologists take many forms," and Colin P.A. Jones' counterarticle, "Much ado, but microimportant"...
OLYMPICS
Jul 1, 2012

Japan's medal count in London hard to forecast

In its past 11 Summer Olympic appearances, dating back to the 1964 Tokyo Games, Japan has collected 275 medals.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jul 1, 2012

The land where sex fears to tread

No love, no sex, no marriage, no kids — such, in glum outline, is Japan today. It's too bleak a picture, it can't be true! But it can't be false either. If it were, people would be marrying, making babies and having love affairs. Instead, statistics reflecting everything from marriage and childbirth...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Jul 1, 2012

Lesley Downer: Love, war and geisha

Lesley Downer's seven books range widely in genre and subject. Here she reflects on their inspiration and her experiences writing them.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Jun 30, 2012

Where the wild things aren't

"I have this idea to get rich quick," says this friend. Like me, he is underwhelmed by his Japanese income. Unlike me, he still has dreams. He also has my attention. For we all want to get rich and "quick" is by far the preferred method. But then he says . . .
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Jun 24, 2012

Escaped-animal antics are good for ratings

One of the interesting factoids accompanying the escaped-penguin story that delighted the media for the last three months is that Japan has more penguins in captivity than any other country. Tokyo Sea Life Park, the facility from which the male Humboldt penguin in question made his break, has 135. The...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jun 22, 2012

Politics is inescapable at 'Arab Express' exhibition

The Arab Spring may not be all it's cracked up to be. There are clearly problems with a large swath of nations, formerly under various forms of authoritarian regimes, switching relatively quickly to "democracy," at least as it is understood in the West.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jun 21, 2012

Hot Chip 'embrace fun' on new album

"I like Zapp, not Zappa" goes "Night and Day," the lead single from London electro-pop quintet Hot Chip, and in one small yet significant statement the five-piece's attitude to music is shouted loud and proud.
Japan Times
BASKETBALL / ONE-ON-ONE WITH ...
Jun 20, 2012

Tyler learned many lessons in first NBA season

The Japan Times has published periodic interviews with bj-league players since the fall of 2006. This is the first One-on-One interview featuring a former bj-league player now in the NBA.
JAPAN / History / JAPAN TIMES GONE BY
Jun 17, 2012

Titanic survivor's tale; a whaler's arrival; Osaka-Tokyo in half the time; early cases of AIDS

100 YEARS AGOTuesday, June 4, 1912
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / MIXED MATCHES
Jun 12, 2012

Couple move to the beat of a different drum

American Chris Holland and Lisa Kakinoki from Yokohama, both 26, first met in 2006 when they were studying at J.F. Oberlin University in Tokyo.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Jun 10, 2012

The public shame of crying poor

Public acts of contrition don't get any more dramatic than comedian Junichi Komoto's May 25 press conference, where he apologized for allowing his mother to collect government welfare payments even though he's made good money himself as a TV personality. Josei Seven, the women's weekly that broke the...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Jun 10, 2012

Matsue: 'City of Water ' with a history set in stone

The train from Okayama to Matsue took nowhere near as long as the one the English writer Sacheverell Sitwell boarded in 1959 to the same destination: "Nine hours from Osaka, into a remote and little-visited part." The region still feels faintly remote, the train carriages clickety-clicking over rivers...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Jun 5, 2012

Rumors, lies fill void left by police in Furlong case

It is one of the more ugly tasks in journalism: trying to extract a quote from a bereaved family after a violent death. By the time I called Nicola Furlong's mother on May 25, she had learned that her 21-year-old daughter had been sexually assaulted and probably throttled by a stranger in a city 10,000...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jun 2, 2012

Japan's great outdoors becomes Oregonian's office-cum-playground

Gliding through powder across Mount Hakkoda in Aomori Prefecture or scanning the surfers at Shonan Beach in Kanagawa Prefecture, Gardner Robinson's life and work merge so completely that on the clock and on the slopes are one and the same.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 1, 2012

'My House'

Two summers ago my son, then 26, shot a documentary about homeless people living on the banks of the Tama River. From hearing his stories and watching the finished product, I learned (or rather had confirmed) that local movie stereotypes of the homeless as lovable eccentrics or pathetic losers didn't...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
May 29, 2012

Photos reunite left-behind parents with lost children, but only on film

If there is no bond deeper or love stronger than that between a parent and a child, then equally, there is no pain greater than when that bond is broken or that love taken away.
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / ON: DESIGN
May 29, 2012

A spring jewelry collection

Kouichi Okamoto of Kyouei Design, who usually creates household items, has launched his first line of jewelry — and of course, it's not your average collection of fashion accessories. The series is titled "form of the function," and all the pieces are made from repurposed industrial components.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 24, 2012

The shaping of a Post-Impressionist

When the influential art critic Clement Greenberg described a particular painter as "the most copious source of what we know as modern art, the most abundant generator of ideas and the most enduring in newness," it wasn't, as some might expect, Pablo Picasso he was referring to but Paul Cezanne, a generation...

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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