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CULTURE / Books
Mar 20, 2001

Shanghai, the heart of China

NEW SHANGHAI: The Rocky Rebirth of China's Legendary City, by Pamela Yatsko. Wiley, 2001, 298 pp., 2,300 yen (paper). Few doubt that Shanghai is the nerve center of China's second "Great Leap Forward." This metropolis -- long considered the most cosmopolitan of all Asian cities -- is the cornerstone...
CULTURE / Books
Mar 15, 2001

Taking the long view on history

EAST ASIA AT THE CENTER: Four Thousand Years of Engagement with the World, by Warren I. Cohen. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, 516 pp. You don't have to believe in the Asian Century or any other form of that nonsense to admit that Western understanding of Asia is woefully inadequate. The intellectual...
CULTURE / Art
Mar 10, 2001

I'm a loser bunny . . . so why doncha pay me?

On a busy sidewalk in Harajuku, a man dressed in a suit sits drinking from a hip flask of Scotch, surrounded by five pink, fluffy rabbits.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 9, 2001

Thais make an enemy out of Myanmar

No one knows who put a bomb on a Thai Airways jet scheduled to carry Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to Chiang Mai, but respected media outlets such as the Matichon newspaper and the Bangkok Post have hinted that the bombing may have something to do with drugs from Myanmar.
LIFE / Travel / NATURE TRAVEL
Mar 7, 2001

Climb rain forests to the clouds

If you've climbed Mount Kinabalu in Sabah Province, Malaysian Borneo, under the impression that you were heroically scaling the highest peak in Southeast Asia, I have bad news.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 2, 2001

Fear, obsession hold back Japan-China ties

In recent years, Japan-China relations have been marked by almost incessant friction over issues ranging from historical questions to more mundane problems.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Feb 27, 2001

Soar with Madame Butterfly

MADAME BUTTERFLY: Japonisme, Puccini, and the Search for the Real Cho-Cho-San, by Jan van Rij. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2001, 192 pp., 24 b/w photos, drawings, map, $24.95 (casebound). Giacomo Puccini's "Madame Butterfly" has become more than just a pretty piece of music. It has turned into something...
CULTURE / Books
Feb 27, 2001

Fairy tales for modern Japan

GHOST OF A SMILE: Stories, by Deborah Boliver Boehm. Kodansha International, 2000, 288 pp., 2,900 yen (cloth). Imagine Lafcadio Hearn venturing to 21st-century Tokyo reincarnated as a single American woman with a penchant for the exotic and erotic, and you will have a sense of the stories in "Ghost of...
LIFE / Food & Drink / NIHONSHU
Feb 22, 2001

Heart and soul of sake in the breweries of Nara

Nara Prefecture can easily be considered the historical heartland of sake. Far more than any other prefecture, historically and culturally, Nara is an extremely significant sake-brewing locale.
LIFE / Digital / SURFERSPUD
Feb 21, 2001

Spud the magic surfer

www.geocities.com/Baja/4954/ This is how Spudster entertained himself this past weekend, trawling through sites like Internet Magic and challenging the online wizard to do things like figure out what Pokemon character he was thinking about. The wizard can also tell you who you were in a past life and...
CULTURE / Books
Feb 20, 2001

More to it than meets the eye: the private world of 'manga'

ADULT MANGA: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society, by Sharon Kinsella. Curzon Press, 2000, 228 pp., $19.95 (paper). "Manga" leads a double life in Japan. Its popularity as entertainment for the masses is well-known: Subway riders furtively flip through its pages, young people crowd into...
CULTURE / Books
Feb 20, 2001

Charting the landscape of Japan's foreign affairs

JAPANESE FOREIGN POLICY TODAY, edited by Inoguchi Takashi and Purnendra Jain. New York: Palgrave, 2000, 316 pp. $59.95 (cloth). This collection of studies on Japan's foreign policy is edited by Takashi Inoguchi, professor of political science at the Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo,...
JAPAN
Feb 16, 2001

Court upholds ban on publishing novel

The Tokyo High Court on Thursday upheld a lower court ruling ordering prizewinning novelist Miri Yuu and publisher Shinchosha Co. to halt publication of a short novel and pay 1.3 million yen to a former friend of Yuu's for violating her privacy.
ENVIRONMENT / GARDENING FOR ALL
Feb 15, 2001

Nature in Tokyo: the long and Short of it

Kevin Short's latest book, "Nature in Tokyo," which came out in December from Kodansha International, is a 335-page guide to animals and plants in Tokyo and the surrounding area. Through this book, readers will become much more aware of the origins of Tokyo and realize that it's not all flat nor totally...
COMMUNITY
Feb 15, 2001

A playground for the imagination

From the outside, Minamisawa Steiner Hoshi-no-ko Kodomo-en kindergarten looks much like any other home-run preschool. The two-story house is approached from a quiet side street, and you enter through a garden gate.
COMMENTARY
Feb 9, 2001

Which 'global standard'?

At the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland last month, Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara reportedly attracted more attention than Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori.
JAPAN / STAGING A COMEBACK
Feb 7, 2001

LDP still kowtows to vested interests at the economy's expense

Pop into a convenience store and you may still find inconvenience: They don't sell medicine and you may not find cigarettes or alcohol at some shops.
LIFE / Digital / SURFERSPUD
Feb 7, 2001

Top 10 alternative reasons to go ADSL

www.icebox.com Like most of the Net's other starving-artist showcases, there's an overwhelming choice here, but the favorite appears to be Queer Duck. The episodes, about a gay mallard, are sharp social satire in which it's difficult, at least at first, to determine whether the author is preaching discrimination...
JAPAN
Feb 6, 2001

Inefficient public works projects creaking under debt burden

KOBE -- The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, the world's longest suspension bridge, looks superb as it spans the Akashi Strait, linking Kobe and Awaji Island in Hyogo Prefecture.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Feb 6, 2001

Modernism revealed

FICTIONS OF DESIRE: Narrative Form in the Novels of Nagai Kafu, by Stephen Snyder. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000, 196 pp., $42 (cloth), $17.95 (paper). Recently, it has been argued that the 18th-century realist tradition (Balzac, Dickens and on to now) is not the only such tradition;...
CULTURE / Books
Feb 2, 2001

Casting a literary eye on Japan's aging society

The sociologist and feminist Ueno Chizuko has released a collection of past essays that examine Japanese literature as primary source material reflecting the society and era in which it was written.
CULTURE / Books / POETRY MIGNETTE
Jan 21, 2001

A little home for poetry in Shinagawa

Keiyudoh is a book store specializing in rare art books, with a small gallery in the back. Currently the gallery features an exhibition of calligraphy by Sueo Akiyama, a self-taught artist, whose works have received cultural awards in Poland and France recently. Keiyudoh also publishes the journal Le...
CULTURE / Books
Jan 16, 2001

Three identities and one life

LIVES OF YOUNG KOREANS IN JAPAN, by Yasunori Fukuoka, translated by Tom Gill. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2000, 330 pp. It is estimated that there were 2.5 million Koreans living in Japan at the end of World War II. Although many returned home after the war, there are still approximately 600,000...
BUSINESS
Jan 8, 2001

Microsoft shows off the Xbox

LAS VEGAS, Nev. -- Attendees at the 2001 Consumer Electronics Show on Saturday were given the first public viewing of Xbox, the new 128-bit video game console being developed by computer software giant Microsoft.
JAPAN
Jan 7, 2001

Ex-mob boss, cop critic sue police, claim freedom of speech violations

OTSU, Shiga Pref. -- In what may be the first case of its kind in Japan, a retired yakuza boss and a vocal police critic are suing Shiga Prefectural Police for what they consider a violation of their constitutional rights.
CULTURE / Books
Jan 5, 2001

Have Japanese novelists lost touch with readers?

The fading interest in reading among younger Japanese first caused alarm several years ago in Japan, but I was recently startled to see a full page devoted to the topic in The New York Times' Book Review section (Dec. 10).
JAPAN
Jan 1, 2001

State-backed Internet expo kicks off

The government-sponsored virtual Internet exposition, an event for the new millennium, went online Sunday.

Longform

Visitors to Kyoto walk along a street near Kiyomizu Temple in April. A popular tourist spot, Kyoto has seen what locals feel to be an overwhelming amount of tourists in 2024.
Is Japan ready for 60 million tourists?