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COMMUNITY
Apr 15, 2001

A yen for thrift

There was a time when Japan prided itself on its thriftiness. Hard times after World War II produced the need to save money and cut every corner. Children were taught that each grain of rice was sacred and not to be wasted. Sardines and mackerel were standard fare, beef reserved only for special occasions....
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Apr 15, 2001

Style as something you buy rather than cultivate

I always leaf through Katei Gaho in my dentist's waiting room. In fact, it's the only place I've ever had a chance to peruse it. Printed on the heaviest glossy paper money can buy, the magazine is more notable for its heft than its content, which is beautifully photographed clothing and household goods...
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Apr 8, 2001

Meditations on the Tao of soba

For a place that evinces such effusive praise ("one of the best soba shops in the world," says at least one connoisseur), Take-yabu has a remarkably undemonstrative presence. In fact it manages to be so self-effacing, few people realize it's there at all.
Events
Apr 3, 2001

Osaka a tale of two 'Americatowns'

OSAKA -- Many cities in Japan, Europe and the United States have a Chinatown. But Osaka now finds itself with two "Americatowns" that, although not competitors, are keeping an eye on each other.
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Apr 1, 2001

Barraca: A cure for the Andalucian blues

Just recently back in town after a leisurely sojourn in Andalucia and suffering bad withdrawal symptoms, we headed down to cozy old Barraca. It's not the most creative Spanish restaurant in Tokyo, perhaps, nor the best-known. Nor does it operate at anything like those late, late Spanish hours. But for...
JAPAN
Mar 31, 2001

Jobless rate declines to 4.7%

Japan's unemployment rate eased in February to a seasonally adjusted 4.7 percent, down from a record-high 4.9 percent for the previous two months, the Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications Ministry said Friday.
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM MOSCOW
Mar 26, 2001

Russians living 'la vida loca'

This semester I am teaching a Dostoevsky course. Implausible plots, stumbling dialogues, everybody in love with everybody, romantic triangles overlap like mating frogs, passions mount, money changes hands and is thrown into the fire -- the normal Dostoevsky stuff.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Mar 25, 2001

Hot rod 'tribes' roar into the night

It's 2:30 a.m. on a Friday night outside the Shibaura parking area, a thin strip of concrete and pavement stuck to a pillar under the belly of Tokyo's Rainbow Bridge. There's a flash of red taillights as vehicles speed in. New arrivals are greeted by leather-clad bikers revving their engines, spitting...
JAPAN
Mar 17, 2001

Foot cult leader failed to declare 750 million yen in income

The founder and former leader of the Honohana Sampogyo foot-reading cult failed to declare some 750 million yen in taxable income for four years until 1999, sources close to the case said Friday.
JAPAN
Mar 13, 2001

October-December GDP grew 0.8%

Japan's gross domestic product expanded a seasonally adjusted 0.8 percent during the October-December period, the Cabinet Office said in a preliminary report Monday.
BUSINESS
Mar 6, 2001

Researchers talk of 'Internet car'

Japanese researchers from academic and business circles are joining forces on a government-sponsored project to develop an "Internet car," project planners said Monday.
JAPAN
Mar 4, 2001

Osaka to emphasize dangers of lighting up

OSAKA -- Forget the bid for the 2008 Olympic Games or the opening of Universal Studios Japan. For those Osaka residents who have long suffered in the presence of cigarette smokers, a recent announcement by the city came as some of the best news in years.
LIFE / Travel
Mar 4, 2001

Shangri-La: Paradise beyond the clouds

LIJIANG, China -- The mystical land of Shangri-La, lost and found in recent years, has moved. It has also upgraded its attractions. This eastern Utopia still offers the tea shops, Tibetan lamas and snow-capped peaks of James Hilton's 1933 bestseller "Lost Horizon," but today's pilgrims can also sample...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 1, 2001

The spy game: high stakes, low payoffs

LONDON -- It's an impressive list: CIA official Aldrich Ames jailed for life in 1994 for spying for Moscow; CIA agent Harold Nicholson jailed for 23 years in 1997 for the same offense; FBI employee Earl Pitts sentenced to 27 years later the same year for passing information to Moscow; U.S. Army Col....
BUSINESS
Mar 1, 2001

Cheap burgers add sauce to McDonald's sales

Favorable sales of half-priced hamburgers boosted earnings of McDonald's Co. (Japan) last year, with its sales for 2000 expanding 9.3 percent to a record high of 431.1 billion yen for the seventh straight year-on-year rise, the company said Wednesday.
LIFE / Food & Drink / KISSA KULTUR
Feb 28, 2001

Copying without an original

In the movie "Mr. Baseball," Tom Selleck's character complains to his Japanese girlfriend that Japan copies everything. She quickly replies, "We may copy it, but we make it better." After a visit to Ashbys of London, located near Akasaka-Mitsuke Station, one would have to agree.
LIFE / Travel
Feb 28, 2001

Asia's heritage boom

Call it nostalgia or call it a self-awakening, but Asians are rediscovering the value of their architectural heritage. From ancient police courts in Shanxi, China to forest temples in Thailand, from colonial quays in Singapore to the brick kilns and iron smithies of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, the...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Feb 25, 2001

Japan studies has explosive effect on U.S. kids

Recently I gave a presentation on Japan to a class of preschoolers in the United States. This month, these 4 and 5-year-olds were studying Japan. Last month they studied Pakistan. They can write their names in Urdu.
LIFE / Digital
Feb 22, 2001

Internet auctions boom

Kazutoshi Kitazawa, a 37-year-old university professor, has been bidding and selling in online auctions for two years. When he feels like upgrading his computer, he browses through Yahoo! Japan's auction Web site to buy memory cards and other computer components at bargain prices. When he decides the...
LIFE / Food & Drink / WINE WAYS
Feb 22, 2001

Take time to savor the days of wine and oysters

Once again fate finds me back in Japan, wondering what I can enjoy eating here that I can't enjoy back in lovable Leuven, Belgium, where one can have excellent cuisine of all kinds with a glass of well-made wine for a pittance (the norm is the Belgian franc equivalent of under 1,000 yen). It's hard to...
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Feb 22, 2001

Sticking to sophisticated yakitori

Yakitori. The term covers a multitude of chicken possibilities, ranging from smoky yatai and stand-up nomiya under the proverbial tracks all the way to plush establishments for Ginza madames where every bird on the menu is reared in free-range bliss, cooked over premium charcoal and washed down with...
JAPAN
Feb 21, 2001

Otaru racism controversy lingers on

OTARU, Hokkaido -- The controversy over some "onsen" (hot spring) bathhouses banning foreigners from their facilities in this northern port town, which is frequented by Russian ships, lingers on more than a year after the issue was first raised.
ENVIRONMENT
Feb 21, 2001

Tiny birds and dwindling treasure

BANGKOK -- Imagine for a moment that you are an edible-nest swiftlet. You are a dusky bird, tiny enough to fit in the palm of a hand. In southern Thailand, where you live, you soar above the turquoise waters and jungle-clad islands of the Andaman Sea. You build your nests inside island caves hidden by...
BUSINESS
Feb 16, 2001

Cabbies, waiters and retailers predict a slowdown

Taxi drivers, waiters and workers in other sectors considered close to the man on the street in January were more pessimistic about the economy than in any other month since the government began conducting its so-called Economy Watchers poll a year earlier, the Cabinet Office said Thursday.
CULTURE / Books
Feb 6, 2001

Japan must open the doors if it is to survive

JAPAN AND GLOBAL MIGRATION: Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society, edited by Mike Douglass and Glenda Roberts. London: Routledge, 2000, 306 pp., 63 British pounds. Japan's demographic time bomb is ticking away. In the coming decades, the nation faces a labor shortage and insolvency...
JAPAN
Feb 2, 2001

Year in prison sought for accused MSDF spy

Prosecutors demanded Thursday a one-year prison term for former Maritime Self-Defense Force Lt. Cmdr. Shigehiro Hagisaki, 38, who is charged with passing defense secrets to a Russian military attache in exchange for cash.
JAPAN
Jan 31, 2001

Popular Chinese chef suspected of tax evasion

A Yokohama restaurant chain owned by popular Chinese cuisine chef Zhou Fuhui, known in Japan as Tomiteru Shu, allegedly evaded around 50 million yen in taxes in the three years through June 1999.
LIFE / Travel
Jan 31, 2001

Britain's secondhand bookshop Mecca

Tottenham Court Road and Charing Cross may be the book centers of London, but the Mecca for secondhand books in Britain is on the English/Welsh border. With more than 30 secondhand bookshops, tiny Hay-on-Wye bills itself as the "town of books."

Longform

Construction takes place on the Takanawa Gateway Convention Center in Tokyo, slated to open in 2025.
A boom for business tourism in Japan?