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Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Sep 10, 2010

From scorn to love: Mishima and bunraku

Yukio Mishima (born in 1925 as Kimitake Hiraoka) is best- known internationally for his novel "Kinkaku-ji" ("The Temple of the Golden Pavilion"), a fictionalized account of the burning down of the famous golden temple of Kyoto. He may also be remembered for his contemporary plays, many of which were...
EDITORIALS
Sep 5, 2010

Definitions of fatherhood

Fathers and mothers starving their infants, grown children hiding the deaths of parents and living off their pensions, the elderly dying of heat stroke alone in their rooms — recently Japan has seen a wave of incidents casting doubt on the strength of family and community ties.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Sep 4, 2010

Actor's trial to test lay judges' neutrality

A test case for the nascent lay judge system got under way Friday at the Tokyo District Court as a celebrity defendant already crucified in the public realm now faces citizen judges, raising questions of whether they can render a judgment free of media influence.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Sep 4, 2010

Campaigning to save the languages of Okinawa

Two stops on Naha's monorail from the tourist trinket shops of Kokusai-dori lies Sakaemachi, a tightly packed warren of tiny stalls and drinking dens. For outsiders like 40-year-old Byron Fija, it takes a measure of confidence to venture to this part of Okinawa, but as he passes the open-air tables of...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 3, 2010

'Trouble in Hollywood (What Just Happened?)'

Hollywood is such a duplicitous, back-stabbing, narcissistic pit of weasels and vipers that making a satire about it should be no more difficult than, say, getting a gram of cocaine delivered to a 90210 address at four in the morning. And yet the conundrum is this: If you really tell it like it is, you...
Japan Times
LIFE
Aug 29, 2010

Anyone for tennis?

If you've ever had a tennis lesson, your coach likely told you to block, rather than swing at your volleys. That knowledge makes it all the more thrilling to watch someone like the athletic 16-year-old Sanae Ota rush in from the back of the court, leap up to a high, floating ball — before it bounces...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 27, 2010

'Tokyo-jima (Tokyo Island)'

It's a common fantasy — being the only guy on an island of beautiful women. But to be the only woman on an island of men, including the good, the bad and the ugly? Somewhat different, isn't it?
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Aug 21, 2010

Voice of the times bridges cultures for seven decades

Most of us would probably be happy to have a handful of memories to reminisce over in our later years, episodes from our youth we could run past our friends while hoping their eyes don't glaze over. Ichiro Urushibara, a British citizen who has spent 69 years in Japan, has enough memories and amusing...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 20, 2010

In search of society's true affluence

"When I was 40, my father died. When he died, he was working on a project for a children's campground on the island of Naoshima. When I returned from Tokyo to Okayama to lead the family company, I inherited the project. As I lived and worked with the locals, my thinking went through a 180-degree reversal....
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Aug 15, 2010

Does cost of peace consign the Japanese to frailty or strength?

A series of articles in the Aug. 1 edition of The Big Issue Japan, a biweekly magazine sold by homeless people, is addressed "to adults who have never known war." Few major powers, past or present, can equal Japan in that regard. Sixty-five years of peace in a bellicose world have turned war in this...
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Aug 8, 2010

A warm embrace for ruff justice

Some years ago, a Belgian woman named An van Dienderen wondered why so many Japanese tourists visited her hometown of Antwerp, and particularly its cathedral. She learned that they wanted to see the place where the boy Nello and his faithful dog Patrasche died in the story "A Dog of Flanders." This thin...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Aug 8, 2010

Discerning Japan's future journey through the prisms of its past

LAST IN A THREE-PART SERIES — T he French revolution in 1789 revolutionized more things than one. It changed the very definition of the word "revolution," which until then — as can be guessed from the literal meaning of its root words, "to turn back again" — meant to revert to something that existed...
EDITORIALS
Aug 7, 2010

Faded bonds with the oldest

There are more than 40,000 people aged 100 or over in Japan and this number is expected to increase. In 2009, Japanese women had the world's longest life expectancy of 86.44 years and men the world's fifth longest life expectancy of 79.59 years. Japan is certainly a country of long life expectancy. But...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Aug 1, 2010

Lee Ufan: Korean at the forefront of Japan's modern art

For the last several years, Benesse Art Site on the island of Naoshima in the Seto Inland Sea has featured prominently in rankings of Japan's best tourist destinations.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Aug 1, 2010

Depression takes hold as promises of Utopia fade away

Why isn't this Utopia? Why, given material and technological advantages beyond the wildest dreams of our most visionary ancestors, are we floundering in a sea of despair?
Japan Times
LIFE
Jul 25, 2010

A northern odyssey

Komandorskiye Ostrova — the Commander Islands in English — are about as bleak and remote as anywhere imaginable for human habitation. Indeed, the two islands in the group, named Bering and Medny, support only one hardy community of fewer than 1,000 souls in a settlement called Nikolskoye on Bering...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / ART BRIEF
Jul 23, 2010

'Robert Waters: MAN'

Mizuma Art Gallery — Mizuma Action
EDITORIALS
Jul 20, 2010

Tax ripoff gets thumbs down

The Supreme Court has decided that a 1968 tax notice imposing inheritance as well as income taxes on the beneficiaries of life-insurance money paid in the form of a pension is illegal. The ruling was the culmination of a lawsuit filed against tax authorities in 2005 by a Nagasaki housewife. She deserves...
CULTURE / Books
Jul 18, 2010

Outer limits of kinky sex and violence

Bored with life and bullied by an overbearing mother, 17-year-old Mari finds a painful solace in the company of a translator of Russian, 50 years her senior. Yoko Ogawa's "Hotel Iris," beautifully translated by Stephen Snyder, deals with obsession, fetishism, loneliness and the multifaceted nature of...
EDITORIALS
Jul 17, 2010

A Cold War redux

Cold War buffs slipped into nostalgia last week as the United States and Russia swapped spies. For some, the hasty exchange of 10 Russian "sleepers" convicted in the U.S. for four men held as spies in Russian jails seemed too familiar, prompting speculation that the arrests might have been intended to...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 16, 2010

Sexual empowerment with a large dose of Grey matter

Sasha Grey is not the sort of movie star you normally see discussed in these pages. With a resume that includes "Oral Supremacy" and "Sex Toy Teens," Grey has risen to become one of the top porn stars in the United States, appearing in more than 180 films in a three-year period starting when she was...
Japan Times
BASKETBALL / HOOP SCOOP
Jul 11, 2010

Hill ready to make impact with Apache

Bob Hill is eager to begin the next chapter in his long, accomplished career as a basketball coach. And he's smart enough to know that some of his biggest adjustments will take place off the court.
JAPAN
Jul 10, 2010

Yamazaki touts Japan's space tech

Praising the level of Japanese space technology, astronaut Naoko Yamazaki expressed hope Friday that the government will allocate more money for science despite the pressure to cut overall expenditures.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Jul 6, 2010

Down — but not out — in Kotobukicho

Yokohama's Ishikawacho Station straddles the border between two worlds. Take a right turn from its south exit and you find yourself among the designer boutiques and Belgian chocolate shops of tourist Motomachi. Head left from the same station, however, walk three minutes and you discover a neighborhood...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Jul 4, 2010

Amami Oshima: Take a trip to the cloud forest of the imagination

Despite the environmental mistakes of the postwar decades, the violation of a once pristine landscape, a recent trip to Amami Oshima, gave very real cause for hope. Some regions have always, it seems, been in good shape. Flying over the island's green, volcanic hills, I felt as if I were gazing down...
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK
Jul 4, 2010

A meeting of minds

In 1958, just before my 18th birthday, I went along on an Inuit hunt for seals in the Canadian Arctic. That was the first time I tasted that rich, dark red — almost black — meat, and it was like nothing else I had eaten before. I loved it.
Japan Times
LIFE
Jun 27, 2010

Asahiyama's natural touch

Ivan the polar bear has been having relationship problems recently.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jun 26, 2010

Global multitasking: it's in her DNA

Miho Natori can recite nursery rhymes in Thai, speak German fluently, converse over coffee in English and is native in Japanese. For this 40-year-old graphic designer, life kaleidoscopes world to world, from Japan, to the orphanage she helped start with her mother in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and to Germany,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 25, 2010

'The Cove'

A Japanese diver who signed up to travel and work aboard a Sea Shepherd (the renowned, independent ocean conservation society) boat told a local magazine that, initially, she was apprehensive because of her nationality. Coming from a nation that does continuous battle with ocean conservationists, she...

Longform

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