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COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Jan 16, 2000

Masayuki Kurokawa

At the recent Art of Dining Exhibition sponsored by Refugees International-Japan, Masayuki Kurokawa and his wife, Taki Katoh, cooperated in presenting a table setting profoundly and strikingly simple. It symbolized, they said, "the harmonization of natural and man-made phenomena."
COMMUNITY / How-tos / GETTING THINGS DONE
Jan 12, 2000

Win some, lose some

Like many of our readers, I continue to miss Gary Larson's The Far Side cartoons. Now I have 366 of them in a millennium collection brought up to date with color and appropriate historic dates which the publisher, Andrews McMeel of Kansas City, calls "a refreshingly irreverent retrospective of the last...
JAPAN
Jan 11, 2000

Yachiyo Bank to take over failed Kokumin

Yachiyo Bank and state-appointed administrators of Kokumin Bank announced Tuesday that the two parties have reached a basic agreement to have Yachiyo take over the failed second-tier regional bank. Of the five second-tier regional banks that went under after the financial reconstruction law took effect...
JAPAN
Jan 10, 2000

Make 'Rebuilding Confidence' the government slogan for 2000

Last year a series of mishaps shook our faith in various things we have grown to trust over the years, from the H-II rocket failure and the crumbling tunnels of our shinkansen lines to the nuclearcriticality accident in Tokai, Ibaraki Prefecture.
COMMUNITY
Jan 3, 2000

Picture-book village looks to the children

Once upon a time, sometime in 1992, there were two communities, Kijo-cho and Ishikawauchi, nestled high in the mountains of Miyazaki Prefecture. As in many such rural communities, the sound of children's voices was becoming a rarity as young families left to find their fortune in the city of Miyazaki,...
CULTURE / Books
Dec 30, 1999

Explore high-tech versions of Japanese classics

GENJI MONOGATARI (THE TALE OF GENJI). Nihon Koten Bungaku Series 1. Released by Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory Ltd. Windows/Macintosh Hybrid CD-ROMs. Kawasaki, Japan and San Jose, CA: Fujitsu Software Corp., 1996. Bilingual Japanese-English. Two disks boxed separately. 6,000 yen or $68 each. HEIKE...
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 30, 1999

Russia's Jewish homeland: a Stalinist experiment in social engineering lingers on

BIROBIDZHAN, RUSSIA -- Mikhail Kul was a soldier in the Soviet Army that helped defeat Germany in 1945, but he returned home to find that the Holocaust had emptied his Ukrainian village of most of its inhabitants.
JAPAN
Dec 29, 1999

Writer, artist unite to portray Okinawa's problems

Staff writer OSAKA -- When artist Seitaro Kuroda was videotaping a series of war stories for children written by prize-winning author Akiyuki Nosaka, he noticed something was missing. The stories, which first appeared in a magazine in 1971, described the hardship brought upon children and animals by...
JAPAN
Dec 29, 1999

Rengo Osaka backs bureaucrat for poll

OSAKA -- Rengo Osaka, the local political arm of the Japanese Trade Union Confederation (Rengo), plans to back Fusae Ota, councilor of the minister's secretariat at the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, in the upcoming gubernatorial election, it was learned Wednesday. The governorship of...
COMMUNITY / How-tos / GETTING THINGS DONE
Dec 23, 1999

Yearend nostalgia

There is something about the holiday season that brings out nostalgia. Old times are recalled. We reach out with Christmas and New Year's cards to friends we haven't seen for years. A lot of conversations begin with, Do you remember . . . It seems that although most people anticipate the opportunities...
LIFE / Travel
Dec 22, 1999

Sun shines again for the city on the Neva

If it wasn't for me, the terrace of the bar would be deserted. The leaves on the plane trees are just beginning to take on their autumn colors, a breeze off the River Neva is blowing in through the massive gateway to the Peter and Paul Fortress and directly in front of me rises the almost sheer golden...
JAPAN
Dec 20, 1999

Prison eyed for Nichiei worker

Prosecutors on Monday demanded an 18-month prison term for a former employee of nonbank moneylender Nichiei Co. for suggesting that a customer sell body parts to repay a loan. Earlier in the hearing, at the Tokyo District Court, Eisuke Arai, 25, pleaded guilty to the charges and tearfully apologized...
CULTURE / Art
Dec 18, 1999

Seattle art world meets on Gallery Walk

SEATTLE -- Eric Painter is a potter. Actually, he was a biologist before he quit his research job with National Marine Fisheries and bought a pottery school and gallery in downtown Seattle's historic Pioneer Square.
JAPAN
Dec 17, 1999

Art group attempts to heal those ravaged by war

Staff writer In these days of "Pokemon" mania, who wouldn't want a personal note from Pikachu? Hector Sierra, 34, a fine arts doctoral student from Colombia, might not seem like the most likely recipient. But the filmmaker and NGO coordinator was as tickled as any kid. Arriving days before Sierra was...
JAPAN
Dec 14, 1999

'Shoko' testimony goes live on TV

After a 20-year hiatus, the public eye was fully readmitted Tuesday to the drama of someone giving sworn testimony before the Diet, as the presidents of two "shoko" moneylenders under fire for heavy-handed loan collection tactics took the witness stand before the Upper House Financial Affairs Committee....
JAPAN
Dec 13, 1999

Bills to lower 'shoko' firms' interest cap pass Diet

The Diet passed a package of bills Monday to tighten restrictions on "shoko" loan lenders by revising a law to cut the interest rate ceiling from 40.004 percent to 29.2 percent starting June 1. Shoko lenders are financial institutions who specialize in making collateral-free, guarantor-required, short-term...
JAPAN
Dec 6, 1999

Construction firm files complaint against Nichiei

OSAKA -- The president of a construction supply firm based in Suita, Osaka Prefecture, and his loan guarantor filed a criminal complaint Monday against nonbank moneylender Nichiei Co. and two of its employees for allegedly using unlawful tactics to get him to repay his debt. According to the complaint...
CULTURE / Art
Dec 5, 1999

Fantasy, drama: visions of a blind artist

When Carter's, the biggest children's clothes maker in the U.S., chose to use blind artist Emu Namae's pastel drawings on their children's line, new doors opened in Namae's life.
CULTURE / Art
Dec 4, 1999

Exorcising demons of relentlessly passing time

Miyako Ishiuchi underwent an experience in her late 20s that was, if not entirely unique, certainly highly unusual: She became entranced with photography because of its smell.
ENVIRONMENT / GARDENING FOR ALL
Nov 24, 1999

A mountainous garden undertaking for all

Rikugien in Tokyo is the last in this series on gardens built in old Edo (modern Tokyo) by daimyo under the Tokugawa military government (bakufu) between 1603 and 1868.
COMMENTARY
Nov 24, 1999

New Luddites at the gates

LONDON -- Ned Ludd was the leader of a mob, circa 1815, who went around smashing up new textile machinery in factories. Ludd calculated, correctly, that traditional jobs would be lost and familiar ways of life destroyed for thousands, even millions of British workers if the machines prevailed.
JAPAN
Nov 22, 1999

Major banks report mostly in the black

All but one of the nation's 17 major banks scored pretax profits in the first half of fiscal 1999, according to midterm reports released by the banks Monday.
LIFE / Travel / NATURE TRAVEL
Nov 17, 1999

Journey to the land of the Exodus

As I stood in front of the bush that burned in Exodus 3:2 but was consumed not, a voice shouted loudly to make itself heard. It was the guide. And he spake unto me (and my tour group), and said, "That is the holy burning bush. It grows nowhere else on the Sinai Peninsula. All attempts to grow cuttings...
EDITORIALS
Nov 13, 1999

Ending the politics of money

Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi has done the right thing in overriding objections from his own party to the ban on donations to individual politicians from firms and other interest groups. His decision, first unveiled in a meeting with opposition party heads Wednesday, paves the way for the enactment of...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM MOSCOW
Nov 13, 1999

A cynic's guide to survival

For a writer, Russia is a treasure trove. It generates the most improbable story lines, the characters it harbors make Hollywood action heroes seem anemic, and its history is a thrilling mixture of triumph and tragedy. The country has seen the apostle Andrew and Adolf Hitler, Emperor Napoleon and Mongol...
JAPAN
Nov 11, 1999

Government unveils 18 trillion yen stimulus

The government unveiled an 18 trillion yen economic stimulus package Thursday that it hopes will put the economy on a full recovery track in the second half of fiscal 2000.
JAPAN
Nov 11, 1999

Nichiei chief admits some collectors 'heavy-handed'

Nichiei Co. President Kazuo Matsuda on Thursday admitted that some employees might have been extremely heavy-handed in trying to collect on loans and apologized for causing trouble to the public.
EDITORIALS
Nov 10, 1999

Cracking down on loan sharks

Japan's continuing credit squeeze is turning the spotlight onto small-business loans from commercial moneylenders -- so-called "shoko" (commerce and industry) loans that carry extremely high interest rates because they require no collateral, only a third-party guarantee. To collect loans, the lenders...
JAPAN
Nov 10, 1999

Health Minister defends nursing-care plan

Neither the principles nor the framework of the government-proposed nursing-care insurance system have been altered, Health and Welfare Minister Yuya Niwa asserted Wednesday.
CULTURE / Books
Nov 10, 1999

Putting Japan on the psychologist's couch

POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY IN JAPAN: Behind the Nails That Sometimes Stick Out (and Get Hammered Down), edited by Ofer Feldman. Commack, N.Y.: Nova Science Publishers, 1999, 340 pp., (cloth). Political psychology is a tricky business. Plain old psychology is difficult enough, digging down as it does in 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?