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COMMENTARY / World
Jun 20, 2010

Try to imagine if nuclear deterrence failed

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. PACIFIC PERSPECTIVES — Before the catastrophic BP oil gush in the Gulf of Mexico, there were environmentalists who warned that offshore drilling was fraught with risk — risk of exactly the type of environmental damage that is occurring. They were mocked by people who chanted...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Jun 19, 2010

Canadian keeps options open via multitask tack

When Osaka-based entrepreneur Ray Kruger, 60, takes a break from a 70-hour work week to reminisce, his stories command attention. He explains about the haunted Buddhist temple he owns in the mountains near Kameoka, Kyoto Prefecture, a 440-year-old registered national treasure still used for occasional...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jun 4, 2010

Red and black and spread all over

The avant-garde generally gravitates toward absolutes; you're either with them or against them. But how often in history has progressive art been created in service of the state's one-size-fits-all ideology? Not many, and perhaps the best-known example is the group that appeared in a brief window of...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 28, 2010

'Crazy Heart'

As the music industry continues its precipitous decline, people — generally people with no experience whatsoever in the biz but who sure like ripping all the music they can for free — have no shortage of advice for musicians. Recorded music is dead, they say, so you have to make your money playing...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 21, 2010

New history of art in the 21st century

To the extent that it exists in the popular consciousness, contemporary art is frequently associated with ideas of "newness" and "antitradition." This is partly to do with the legacy of the early 20th-century Dada movement. Responding to the social ferment surrounding World War I, the Dadaists rejected...
JAPAN / MIXED MATCHES
May 18, 2010

Language no problem for gallery pair

Hitoshi Ohashi, 48, and Robert Tobin, 63, have been in a relationship for 20 years. When they first met at a bar in the Shinjuku district in Tokyo, Ohashi, a makeup artist, barely spoke English, and Tobin, an American professor in the business department at Keio University, didn't know much Japanese....
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
May 16, 2010

'Pig Meat' journeys from cute to cutlets

A series of food-safety scandals in the early and mid 2000s — involving, among other scares, bacteria-infected milk and poisonous Chinese dumplings — have made many more people in Japan aware of the need to know — and the danger of not knowing — the origins of their daily fare.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 7, 2010

'Whip It (Roller Girls Diary)'

Having been a star player in Hollywood her entire life, Drew Barrymore views the set from the other side of the camera, in "Whip It" (released in Japan as "Roller Girls Diary") — a wobbly but adorable, whip-smart feature debut. Barrymore, whose own screen presence is always wildly ingratiating, made...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
May 1, 2010

An artist's love affair with ceramics

Ceramic artist Swanica Ligtenberg returned from her native Holland in early January with a new sense of purpose. She no longer felt an outsider in a family of goldsmiths and silversmiths, because in speaking with her uncle — still creatively active at age 91 — she realized that the roots of his and...
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 30, 2010

A cloud over airplane safety

PRINCETON, N.J. — When airports across Europe reopened after the closure caused by the eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano, it was not because the amount of ash in the atmosphere had dropped, but because the risk that the ash posed to airplane safety had been reassessed. Was it new scientific...
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Apr 29, 2010

Why cook food when it is better for you raw?

Sixteen years ago, the Boutenkos were a family in crisis. Mother Victoria was overweight and depressed. Her husband, Sergei, had arthritis. Their teenage son was battling diabetes, while their daughter suffered from asthma.
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 28, 2010

Ethics of citizenship tests

PRINCETON, N.J. — Can citizenship really be tested? An increasing number of countries — especially, but not only, in Europe — seem to think so.
LIFE / Digital / JAPAN TIMES BLOGROLL
Apr 28, 2010

Hikosaemon

New Zealand-born Hikosaemon (who prefers to go by his YouTube moniker) was raised an army brat. His father's overseas postings allowed him to see a bit of the world at an early age, and a two-year stay in Singapore when he was 7 years old helped spark his interest in Asian cultures. After returning to...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Apr 23, 2010

Different by design

HOLLYWOOD — Tim Burton, the filmmaker who gave a new spin to the classic children's book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," has now taken up the challenge of a greater classic, "Alice in Wonderland."
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WORDS TO LIVE BY
Apr 22, 2010

Meiji delivery people Masayoshi and Haruko Yoshikawa

Masayoshi and Haruko Yoshikawa (79 and 73) deliver milk and yogurt to homes in Tokyo's shitamachi (downtown). Every morning, except Sundays, the two make their rounds carrying dozens of old-fashioned, small glass bottles of Meiji milk to their faithful customers, many of whom have been drinking it daily...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Apr 16, 2010

Sam's the man in this 'Moon'

HOLLYWOOD — "Boy, you're bringing back an experience where I got fed up and pretty tired of myself!" exclaims Sam Rockwell on the topic of the sci-fi cult film "Moon," which he dominates more than any other single actor has done in a movie for years.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Apr 16, 2010

Building a new history in Tokyo

The first thing that occurs to you as you survey the dark wooden floorboards, high skirting boards, deep-colored walls, fireplaces and — until July 25 — the selection of Eduoard Manet paintings at the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum in Marunouchi, Tokyo, is that on entering this grand redbrick building...
Japan Times
LIFE
Mar 28, 2010

Death of Yeats end of Irish literary revival, says Pound, Noh enthusiast

June 5, 1939
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WORDS TO LIVE BY
Mar 25, 2010

Nail artist Chieko Ishijima

Chieko Ishijima, 25, is the manager of Brilliant Nail Shibuya, a salon next door to the Marui and Seibu department stores, smack in the middle of one of Tokyo's hubs of young fashion. She quickly painted and sculpted her way to the top of the highly competitive nail-art industry with intricately layered...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Mar 20, 2010

Fire in the belly, passion in the eyes

Tania Luiz is a rare woman able to provoke hoots and screeches in a room packed with girls — and she does it all with her torso. The Osaka-based Portuguese belly dancing teacher and performer is profiting from a recent surge of interest in her art among Japanese females.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 19, 2010

'I Love You Phillip Morris'

The Phillip Morris addiction that gets a little out of control
Japan Times
LIFE
Mar 14, 2010

In the land of the kami

"In some rural areas even today, elderly villagers face the rising sun each morning, clap their hands together, and hail the appearance of the sun over the peaks of the nearby mountains as 'the coming of the kami,' " — so wrote historian Takeshi Matsumae in "The Cambridge History of Japan," published...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Mar 7, 2010

Way down south in Hateruma

In 1965, a Dutch anthropologist named Cornelius Ouwehand sailed with his Japanese wife, Shizuko, to the remote island of Hateruma to undertake research. The series of monochrome images they took of daily life, work and ritual there were eventually published under the simple title "Hateruma."
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Mar 7, 2010

Yoshiharu Fukuhara: 'Mr. Shiseido' blends beauty and business

In July 1942, seven months after the attack on Pearl Harbor that started the Pacific War, Tokyo hosted one of the most ambitious exhibitions of art the world had ever seen. "Leonardo da Vinci," staged in an exhibition hall in the central district of Ueno, featured 600 exhibits by and related to the Italian...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Feb 28, 2010

Three LatAm capitals and the Tokyo of 1964

NEW YORK — While visiting three capitals in Latin America on a lecture tour earlier this month, I wondered if Tokyo looked or felt like any of these cities to someone visiting it from New York or a large European city half a century ago.
Japan Times
LIFE
Feb 28, 2010

Focusing on the dark side

When the documentary filmmaker Motoharu Iida was asked by an animal-loving elderly woman to make a film to save the lives of abandoned cats and dogs, he was not sure what he could do.

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