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EDITORIALS
Jul 31, 2005

Rescue from property sharks

Fraudulent and malicious sales methods victimizing innocent people have become a social issue. In a typical case, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department arrested four former salesmen last month on suspicion of having cajoled or pressured some 5,400 people in 34 prefectures into signing contracts for...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Jul 30, 2005

Michiyo Durt-Morimoto

Eleven years ago, Michiyo Durt-Morimoto did not go on her usual visit to Europe. She wrote to her longtime teacher in Belgium that she was preparing a book on her 25 years of artistic production. He replied that the book would mark the completion of only one period of her life, a "prelude of what is...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jul 24, 2005

Strangelove encounters of a MAD scientist kind

Herman Kahn is back in the news.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Jul 23, 2005

Sathya Saran

"I think I am a good writer. That's the only skill I have," said Sathya Saran on a visit to Tokyo from Bombay.
LIFE / Travel
Jul 22, 2005

Foreign writer who defined Japan has been carved into stone in Matsue

The name usually means nothing whatsoever to the vast majority of people overseas. But in his adopted country, Lafcadio Hearn is lionized among writers in the English language with the same kind of reverence normally accorded to authors of the ilk of Melville and Shakespeare.
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Jul 21, 2005

Beauty: Japanese women's never-ending quest

Elsewhere in the world women are concerned about politics, social issues, family, warfare or simply survival. In Japan, it seems their interests are centered on just one thing: bi (beauty).
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Jul 21, 2005

Birds of no feather

It's a strange fact but true, that if you hike regularly in the Japanese mountains, you'll see some amazing sights -- and I don't mean just magnificent scenery.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jul 10, 2005

Existential dilemma from the Japanese wasteland

TOWARD MEANING: Poems of Kikuo Takano, translated by Hiroaki Sato. Middletown Springs, Vermont: P.S., A Press, 2004, 116 pp., $12 (paper). Kikuo Takano (born 1927) first wrote poetry in the bleak postwar years and is said to have burned his initial output. Aligning himself in 1953 with Ayukawa Nobuo's...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 7, 2005

Hungry underclass growing

There is a pain in the belly of Africa that just will not go away. It is gnawing at our development goals and undermining our economies. It is blighting the lives of the young and shortening the life span of the old, yet somehow it is being forgotten. What is this scourge that stalks our continent? A...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 6, 2005

No swansong yet for a modern diva

Ballet is a fickle master. It demands years of selfless dedication from its young and beautiful devotees, only to discard them the moment they pass their prime. Ballerinas rarely remain centerstage beyond their early 30s, so when Royal Ballet star Darcey Bussell became pregnant with her first child,...
JAPAN
Jul 6, 2005

Cult leader loses murder appeal over false beliefs

The Supreme Court has dismissed the appeal of a 66-year-old cult leader who was sentenced to seven years in prison for murdering a sick man by attempting to cure him through supernatural means instead of proper medical treatment, according to the ruling made available Tuesday.
CULTURE / Art
Jul 6, 2005

Consciously painting the subconscious

One of my favorite paintings is one by a trained elephant that I picked up on holiday in Thailand daubed by a trained elephant. It's not a very good one, but the story behind it makes it special -- highlighting one of the aspects by which art has come to be judged.
CULTURE / TV & Streaming / CHANNEL SURF
Jul 3, 2005

TBS's "Nyokei Kazoku," NHK's "Year Zero Africa" and more

Novelist Toyoko Yamazaki has been called the Arthur Haley of Japan for her sprawling melodramas, which usually contain large casts of characters. With "Nyokei Kazoku" (The Female Line) she tackled the sprawling Japanese family saga. Focusing as it does on a well-to-do Osaka merchant family whose lineage...
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Jun 30, 2005

Changing values pose problems for terminal care in Japan

Several years ago, I read cancer surgeon Fumio Yamazaki's unforgettable book titled "Dying in a Japanese Hospital." Through case studies of his patients, he describes the final moments in the lives of terminal cancer sufferers. Invariably, just as a patient is slipping away, doctors battle to resuscitate...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Jun 29, 2005

World Press prizewinning photos get to the heart of the story

Every year the Dutch-based non-profit organization World Press Photo sifts through thousands of news photographs from around the world in search of images that "represent an event, situation or issue of great journalistic importance and demonstrate an outstanding level of visual perception and creativity."...
JAPAN
Jun 29, 2005

LDP council drops consensus to stamp revised postal bills

Two months after the Cabinet of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi sent a package of postal privatization bills to the Diet, his Liberal Democratic Party's Executive Council decided Tuesday to back a revised version of them by a majority vote.
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Jun 27, 2005

Shining a light on Turkish-Japanese ties

NEW YORK -- Selcuk Esenbel was in town. For many years now a professor of history at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Selcuk was, when I met her more than 30 years ago, studying Japanese history at Columbia University. The fruit of that study is her 1998 tome, which she gave me during her previous visit...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jun 26, 2005

Intriguing mix of loose ends and aimless youth

THE METHOD ACTORS, by Carl Shuker. Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005, 512 pp., $16 (paper). There has been a great deal of discussion and debate about where literary modernism ends and postmodernism begins. The confusion arises in part because, far from being something entirely different than...
Japan Times
Features
Jun 19, 2005

Tomb raver

Teenage years are often a time of confusion. But for one 37-year-old who goes by the pen name Kajipon Maruko Zangetsu, it was a time of torment due to family problems and a majorly broken heart.
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Jun 14, 2005

Cyber war grips Asia

If comments on bulletin boards were bullets and hacking attacks real skirmishes then East Asia would probably be a war zone now.
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Jun 9, 2005

TM bolsters notion of a Japanese mind-set over mortality

As we heard in a government white paper on the elderly last week, the number of people aged 90 or over topped 1 million in Japan for the first time in 2004. Japan has long held the record for its citizens having the longest life expectancy in the world. And the government is only too aware of the graying...
COMMUNITY
May 31, 2005

Write back

Community Page readers respond to Satoko Kogure's article on gender equality in Japan (May 3) and Vanessa Mitchell's piece on the lack of aid resources for sex crime victims (May 17) in Japan
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
May 29, 2005

The Alban Berg Quartett know Schubert inside out

The Alban Berg Quartett occupies a near-legendary position among string quartets. Their technical fluency, the beauty of their playing, the harmony of their interpretation -- have left critics searching for superlatives and ensured their constant demand in recital halls around the world.
Japan Times
Features / WEEK 3
May 15, 2005

No laughing matter

O n the stage, Charlie Chaplin was known as the tramp who made millions laugh without saying a word. But in his heart of hearts, it seems the great comic wanted to be a statesman whose words could change history.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
May 15, 2005

The last of the romantics: lost beauty and childhood

HELEN WADDELL'S WRITINGS FROM JAPAN, edited and introduced by David Burleigh. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005, 184 pages, with b/w illustrations, 42.50 euros (cloth), 25 euros (paper). Now famous as a medieval savant, author of "The Wandering Scholars" and "Medieval Latin Lyrics," Helen Waddell (1889-1965)...
COMMUNITY
May 8, 2005

Serial stereotyping only serves others' brazen hubris

Ever since the reopening of Japan to the outside world in the mid-19th century, people from the West have categorized Japanese life in terms of one or another social model. Whatever the category chosen, though, the inference has always been that Japan is "different." How else would you account for something...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
May 8, 2005

Window dressing the great divide

THE SARI SHOP, by Rupa Bajwa, W.W. Norton Company, 2005, 224 pp., $13.95 (paper). Indian-ness has ceased to be the flavor of the season, or at least that's what they've been saying in Indian publishing circles. One only wishes this were true. The "Indian experience" is the proverbial dead horse, flogged...
CULTURE / TV & Streaming / CHANNEL SURF
May 8, 2005

TBS's drama special "Yao" shows a young man in the world of host clubs, and more

Women with no money or job prospects often become bar hostesses, where the only skill required is an ability to make men part with their money. Lately, the tables have been turning, with male hosts trying to get well-to-do women to buy expensive drinks by engaging them in flattering conversation.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Apr 20, 2005

Serving up a dish fit for the '50s

"The Kitchen," Arnold Wesker's sizzlingly angry play about youthful discontent in postwar Britain, opened a two-week run in Tokyo's Shibuya last week for only its third major staging in Japan since its London premiere in 1959.

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