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COMMENTARY / World
Sep 13, 2007

Twisting history for unpleasant purposes

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, New York — U.S. President George W. Bush is not generally known for his firm grasp of history. But this has not stopped him from using history to justify his policies. In a recent speech to American war veterans in Kansas City, he defended his aim to "stay the course" in Iraq by...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 13, 2007

Memories of fortresses and clouds

Watching on television as the second plane hit the World Trade Center in 2001, Japanese sculptor Masayuki Nagare's thoughts were not with his most famous sculpture, "Cloud Fortress" (1975), which was located at the base of the towers. The then 78-year-old was recalling a time 58 years earlier when, as...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Sep 11, 2007

Volunteering: How to start making a difference this fall

First in a two-part series
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WORDS TO LIVE BY
Sep 11, 2007

Toru Otsuka

Toru Otsuka, 67, is the president of Live Coffee, a coffee importer and roaster known for selling the best beans for the least dough. Otsuka is a treasure hunter: he handpicks only the highest quality from small growers around the globe, and considers his best finds the people who work with him. His...
EDITORIALS
Sep 9, 2007

Surviving in Net cafes

Over 5,000 people in Japan spend their nights at 24-hour Internet cafes every night, according to the first, but certainly not the last, survey on so-called Net cafe refugees by the labor and welfare ministry. On one hand, it seems that school refusers were first, then job refusers, now "home refusers,"...
COMMENTARY
Sep 9, 2007

Extreme events fire up the Greek fringe

LONDON — "How are our children going to survive in a land that is dead?" asked a survivor of the wildfires that seared much of southern Greece during the last week of August.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 7, 2007

The king of Kita Kyushu

Shinji Aoyama was in an up mood when The Japan Times met him at the office of his distributor, Style Jam. His new film, "Sad Vacation," opened the Horizons section at the Venice Film Festival last week, and though, when we met, he confessed himself nervous at the prospect of facing a foreign audience,...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Sep 5, 2007

Clock ticking as Councilor Kawada goes after what has long ailed Japan

Newly elected Upper House lawmaker Ryuhei Kawada was diagnosed with hemophilia soon after he was born.
Reader Mail
Sep 5, 2007

Beware the sponsors of education

Shinichi Terada's implication in his Aug. 17 article, "Rural universities feel pinch of lower enrollments," that the economic troubles of many Japanese universities might be alleviated by applying more market-friendly approaches to their institutional structures and courses of study indicates a frightening...
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle / ON THE BOOK TRAIL
Sep 4, 2007

"The Devil's Breath," "Mr. Putter — Tabby Spin the Yarn"

"The Devil's Breath," David Gilman, Puffin Books; 2007; 377 pp. Close on the heels of Charlie Higson's highly successful Young Bond series comes another adrenalin-pumping adventure story that reads like a Robert Ludlum thriller tailor-made for teenagers.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Sep 1, 2007

Manga magic from a girl who uses her melon

Worth a reported ¥500 billion every year, Japan's manga industry is a serious business. But not so for Saki Matsuzawa, a budding 12-year-old mangaka (comic book artist) who has created her own adorable interactive storybook, "Meron Pan no Ichi Nichi" (titled in English as "A Day of the Melon Bread"),...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 31, 2007

'Planet Terror'/'Death Proof'

With their double-feature project "Grindhouse," directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez seek to revive a bit of cinematic history, namely the grindhouse: the flea-pit inner-city theaters of the 1970s (think NYC's old Times Square), with dodgy clientele, that inevitably had a double-feature of...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 30, 2007

Cities in the dust

The Fascist dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco wasn't everyone's cup of tea — but he did manage the unusual feat of transcending time.
BUSINESS
Aug 30, 2007

Hedge fund numbers, assets mushroom as stocks languish

Hiromichi Tsuyukubo ran the best-performing fund in Japan at Mitsubishi UFJ Asset Management Co., an arm of the nation's biggest lender. Then, after six years, he decided to join a hedge fund.
COMMENTARY
Aug 28, 2007

America's dirty little victory

NEW YORK — "Just about everyone agrees that the recent conviction of Abdullah al-Muhajir, aka Jose Padilla, is a good thing," wrote rightwing pundit Neil Kressel in The New York Post.
COMMENTARY
Aug 27, 2007

Hope for peace in partition?

Why is the world so reluctant to accept partition as the answer to ethnic, religious or political conflicts? The Kosovo conflict may finally be moving in that direction, but only after all sides debased themselves by years of murderous conflict. In Iraq, too, the much-needed separation into three autonomous...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Aug 24, 2007

Love you and you're green

It seems that when Amami-Oshima, an island in southern Kagoshima Prefecture, was created, there was just one color left on the palette: green.
Japan Times
Reference / SO WHAT THE HECK IS THAT
Aug 21, 2007

Pocket tissues

Dear Alice,
Japan Times
JAPAN / EXPLAINER
Aug 21, 2007

'Hanko' fate sealed by test of time

A "hanko" personal seal is a necessary item for most adults in Japan, serving the same role as a signature in the West.
Japan Times
Reference / Special Presentations / WITNESS TO WAR
Aug 21, 2007

Censors unable to hide defeat: China escapee

In April 1945, Yukika Sohma and her four small children boarded a packed train in Mudanjiang in Manchuria bound for the port of Rajin in what is today North Korea. From there, the family took a crowded ship to Niigata Prefecture, then another train to Fukushima Prefecture to join relatives.
COMMENTARY
Aug 20, 2007

Know that the devil is in the derivative

LOS ANGELES — Although Warren Buffet does have — I reluctantly admit — more money than I do (like maybe $50 or so billion more?), we do share a pair of common traits. The first is that this internationally famous investment banker (known as the "Sage of Omaha") tends to favor cautious, carefully...
Japan Times
SOCCER / J. League
Aug 19, 2007

Tanaka makes case for call-up

Tatsuya Tanaka did all he could to convince Japan coach Ivica Osim to pick him for the upcoming friendly against Cameroon with a blistering display for Urawa Reds in a 4-1 victory over Ventforet Kofu on Saturday evening that moved the defending champions to the top of the J. League.
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / WEEK 3
Aug 19, 2007

Beauty beheld in brutalism

No matter how wild or wacky their hobbies or obsessions, in the age of the Internet no one need feel isolated any more, and by casting all inhibitions aside almost anyone is assured of finding like-minded others out there in cyberspace — if not just around the corner from home.
COMMENTARY
Aug 18, 2007

China's tough leap forward

BRUSSELS — Ever since Deng Xiaoping's aphorism "Black cat, white cat, who cares as long as it can catch mice" was burned into Chinese souls by the successive horrors of the Great Leap Forward, its resulting famine and the Cultural Revolution's shambolic savagery, China has seen 10 percent-plus growth...
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Aug 17, 2007

Rural universities feel pinch of lower enrollments

Hagi International University in Yamaguchi Prefecture filed for court protection from creditors in June 2005, owing ¥3.7 billion after the number of freshmen enrollments and students declined sharply.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Aug 17, 2007

A cooling swim good enough to (almost) die for

It's hot. Sweltering hot. And humid. And it's not going to cool down any time soon.

Longform

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