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Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
May 20, 2012

The wonder of feathers

A soft flake of seeming sky falls, wafts and floats earthward catching the light. Lightly, and soft as gossamer, it lands to add a splash of color to the greenery of spring. It may be no more than a tiny feather that's fallen from a passing bird, but it carries with it a message of mystery and miracle...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / Japan Pulse
May 15, 2012

Rediscovering Japan's 'lost generation' and Tokyo Beatles

LIFE.com unearths photos of pill-popping hipsters, doing the hippie hippie shake, back in the day.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices
May 8, 2012

The top 10 Zeit Gist articles of the past decade, chosen by the readers

1. Battling a broken system, by RICHARD CORY One day in March, just minutes after my daughter and I returned home from celebrating her graduation from elementary school that morning, her mother, from whom I had filed for divorce in January after 17 years of marriage, lured my daughter out of the house,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
May 4, 2012

Monkeying around on the stage

Britain's longest-serving theater critic, Michael Billington of The Guardian newspaper, is famous for not lavishing praise on his subjects easily or often.
COMMENTARY
Apr 30, 2012

Fact-checking Japan's critics

The better U.S. media now use fact-checkers and truth meters to debunk outrageous claims by politicians. Maybe Japan should do the same toward its critics.
Japan Times
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Apr 30, 2012

Urban safari in the concrete jungle reveals Tokyo wildlife

Tokyo is a city of many things, but "nature"? Not exactly a word that most associate with the metropolis. When it comes to the city's animal life, most Tokyoites think meiwaku dōbutsu (迷惑動物, pests) rather than yasei-dōbutsu (野生動物, wildlife), associating animal encounters with mischievous...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / LIGHT GIST
Apr 24, 2012

Poetic, but maybe not justice: Japan demystified in haiku

One of my goals in writing for The Japan Times over the years has been to try to render the seemingly arcane functioning of the Japanese legal system a bit more comprehensible to non-Japanese, non-legal types. This involves a big assumption that I understand it myself, but I have at least tried to offer...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Apr 22, 2012

Stalin-era Russian writer penned part of his own death sentence in Japan

"I don't think there is another nation of people in the world like the Japanese. In Britain there is coal in Wales, but Japan makes up for the lack of such a place with an abundance of national will and national sensitivity ... a people's most hard-to-come-by resources. (These are) the country's biggest...
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Apr 21, 2012

New Olympus picks defeat protests

Olympus Corp. won approval Friday to appoint new management, including Yasukuki Kimoto as chief executive officer and Hiroyuki Sasa as president, despite opposition from foreign shareholders.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Apr 17, 2012

Bread and becquerels: a year of living dangerously

My New Year's resolution back in January was to survive this year, and many more to come, which means keeping myself and my family as far from harm's way as possible.
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / TECH_JAPAN
Apr 11, 2012

Capture your ideas any which way with these USB peripherals

Over the last five years or so, the USB drive has eliminated the need to cart around expensive disks of varying sizes that don't hold much data, or burn endless CDRs, making life a lot more convenient for computer users everywhere. Recently, the storage and connection format has seen some impressive...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Apr 8, 2012

War criminal's son and British 'railway man' bridge war's painful divide

In September 1943, eight British officers were tortured by their Japanese captors at the prisoner-of-war camp in Kanchanaburi, Thailand. The camp, and a nearby bridge over the Kwai River, were later the setting for director David Lean's multi-Oscar-winning 1957 film "The Bridge on the River Kwai," about...
Reader Mail
Apr 5, 2012

Weak spirit for sustainability

Why would anyone reading Gwynne Dyer's April 3 article, "Civilization will live or die by new technology," make any real effort to lead a life that would make Earth's future more sustainable?
Japan Times
LIFE
Mar 25, 2012

Sakura: Soul of Japan

"If I were asked to explain the Japanese spirit, I would say it is wild cherry blossoms glowing in the morning sun!" — Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), nativist thinker and poet
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Mar 25, 2012

Is Japan as busy as it first seems?

Are things what they seem? Can you tell a book by its cover? Does the face reveal the heart? Does your appearance give you away?
CULTURE / Books
Mar 25, 2012

Plight of women and the young in modern Japan

Demographic Change and Inequality in Japan, edited by Sawako Shirahase. Trans Pacific Press, 2011, 239 pp., $34.95 (hardcover) This stimulating collection of nine essays examines the implications of demographic trends for inequality in Japan. The contributors are sociologists who elucidate how changes...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Mar 24, 2012

Children taught radiation studies

A group of elementary school students in Koriyama, about 60 km from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 plant, may only be 10 years old, but they possibly know more about radiation than fourth-graders anywhere in the world.
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
Mar 18, 2012

Ryunosuke Akutagawa in focus

Though he died by his own hand at the age of 35, novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa's accomplishments were such that, even after so brief a writing career, Japan's most prestigious literary accolade — the Akutagawa Prize — now bears his name.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Mar 11, 2012

The power of bad news

Weekly Playboy magazine discerns among young people a rising interest in Buddhism. This is surprising, given Japan's well-known "religion allergy" — or not, given that troubled times often inspire spiritual quests.
CULTURE / Books
Mar 11, 2012

Dark side of sumo

BIG HAPPINESS: The Life and Death of a Modern Hawaiian Warrior, by Mark Panek. University of Hawaii Press, 2011, 320 pp., $18.99 (paperback) Hawaii was once a prime recruiting ground for professional sumo. The pioneer was Jesse Kuhaulua from Oahu's Happy Valley, who entered the sport in 1964 and rose...
Japan Times
LIFE
Mar 11, 2012

Young hopes bloom eternal

The first anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake is a time to commemorate the victims of that terrible tragedy. But it is also an opportunity to look to the future.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Mar 10, 2012

Cambodia experience facilitated aid effort in the Tohoku region

Cathy Hirano says it was "so painful to feel powerless in the face of such a huge disaster," recalling the day a year ago that the Pacific coast of Tohoku was hit by the huge earthquake and tsunami.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 9, 2012

Ridley Scott wants your home movies for crowd-sourced 3/11 tribute doc

Where will you be on March 11?
Japan Times
JAPAN / QUEST FOR RECOVERY
Mar 7, 2012

Fukushima farmers in two-front war

Both the reality of radiation and the rumors surrounding it continue to plague farmers in Fukushima Prefecture a year into the crisis that started last March 11 when a megaquake and monster tsunami put a local nuclear plant on a path to three reactor meltdowns.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WORDS TO LIVE BY
Feb 28, 2012

Educator, writer, farmer Gregory Clark

Gregory Clark, 75, is the Honorary President of Tama University and Trustee of Akita International University in Japan. A prolific writer, with a background in economics and international politics, his opinionated investigative pieces often spark intensive debates. His 1978 book "The Japanese Tribe:...
COMMENTARY
Feb 27, 2012

U.S. flirts with risky cold war in warm waters

On two occasions in my life I found myself living close to the South China Sea. The sea became my escape from life's pressing responsibilities. There is no escaping the fact that the serene waters are now also grounds for a nascent but real new cold war.
EDITORIALS
Feb 19, 2012

Costly price of expensive education

A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has found a few positives in Japan's educational situation. Japan has generally improved its educational conditions relative to other OECD countries, but the costs of education remain extremely high with little financial...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Feb 18, 2012

Tireless volunteer Fukuda makes a difference in the lives she touches

Julie Fukuda, 75, is a giver — not financially, but physically — who has tirelessly volunteered for various organizations in her community for nearly 50 years in Japan.

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