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Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Jun 1, 2013

Destroyer of domestic chaos charts way for others to lead organized lives

Jo Ebisujima describes herself as "a hybrid of MacGyver and Martha Stewart."
Japan Times
JAPAN
May 30, 2013

Tsunami hero continuing disaster education efforts

Since the Great East Japan Earthquake, regional governments have been reviewing their disaster plans and enhancing preparations, from boosting buildings' quake resistance to increasing their stockpiles of emergency food and blankets for immediate use.
COMMENTARY / World
May 30, 2013

Tumblr's boy wonder won't like grown-up world

A happy ending to the fairy tale of how David Karp, a 26-year-old autodidact who founded Tumblr, stands to make $250 million from Yahoo is in considerable doubt.
Reader Mail
May 30, 2013

The power of ideas over time

In his May 23 letter, "Watching what the church does," Barry Ward cannot refute Jennifer Kim's comments (May 16 letter, "Catholic link to human rights"), which show the debt owed by modern human rights conventions to Judeo-Christian teaching. So, instead, Ward fumes over historical wrongs committed by...
Reader Mail
May 30, 2013

Jump-starting the use of English

Amy Chavez's May 25 column, "English education and English sheepdogs," gives a clear-cut reason why Japanese people usually have a lot of difficulties speaking English.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
May 28, 2013

281_Anti Nuke's anger at authority is at a critical mass

More than two years after the triple reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, hundreds of thousands of residents of the Tohoku region of northeastern Honshu remain displaced, the power station teeters on the brink of further disaster and large swaths of northern Japan are so irradiated...
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / ON: GAMES
May 28, 2013

Revamped 'Shin Megami Tensei IV,' a new 'DoDonPachi Saidaioujou' and collectable merchandise

Most collectible statues are a few inches or perhaps 30 cm tall. Typically, they are not life-size. But this is no typical statue.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE FOREIGN ELEMENT
May 28, 2013

Want more out of Japan but face doesn't fit? Be TOFITR

I recently served as a "private sector representative" in a panel discussion before an audience of foreign graduate students at the University of Tokyo. Many of the students will soon be seeking employment in Japan; because I have spent 25 years living in or traveling to Japan, the last 10 or so running...
COMMENTARY / Japan / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
May 27, 2013

The transient rasping that captivates the poets

Do cicadas create a shrieking hell? Are they ugly? There is a striking difference between English and Japanese Wikipedia entries on these transient insects.
Reader Mail
May 26, 2013

A pet is a lifelong commitment

Regarding the May 21 Kyodo article, "Destroying pets at Kochi animal center pains staff": Not to mention how much it pains the animals being put down. Sasano Nomura (the Small Animal Management Center staffer quoted in the article) is lucky that she feels depression. It's a good sign that she still has...
Reader Mail
May 26, 2013

Language debate goes nowhere

I assume that one purpose of publishing The Washington Post article titled "English-language education proposal has French up in arms" on The Japan Times' front page May 20 was to stimulate the ongoing debate about English education in Japan.
Japan Times
WORLD
May 25, 2013

Driverless cars, pilotless planes ... will there be jobs left for us?

Suddenly a robotized, automated economic reality is moving off the science fiction pages and into daily life. The growing use of unmanned battlefield drones is encouraging the growth of pilotless commercial aircraft — the first ever flew in British airspace last month. Google's driverless car is completing...
Japan Times
WORLD
May 25, 2013

Africa's Lincoln or a tyrant exploiting Rwanda's tragic story?

Paul Kagame is angrier than I've ever seen him. Rwanda's president is famously direct with his critics. His contempt for governments he's crossed swords with, led by the French, is only marginally less vitriolic than his view of human-rights groups daring to lecture him, the rebel leader whose army put...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
May 24, 2013

'The Place Beyond the Pines'

Though religion is never an issue, the sins of the fathers is a theme that reverberates with biblical overtones in "The Place Beyond the Pines." After his intense examination of a marriage gone sour in "Blue Valentine," director/writer Derek Cianfrance teams up once again with actor Ryan Gosling...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
May 24, 2013

Shizuoka theater festival courts the avant-garde

Claude Regy says the team at the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) threw him the "best birthday party ever" when he arrived in Japan just days after the actual May 1 occasion.
Japan Times
JAPAN
May 23, 2013

Cesium levels in water, plankton baffle scientists

Plankton and seawater samples taken less than a year after the Fukushima meltdowns show high concentrations of radioactive cesium at different locations, puzzling scientists.
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital
May 22, 2013

Cracked cellphone screens become the latest youth status symbol

Brittany Lofton spots them all the time: teens and college students clutching their beat-up cellphones, with screens so cracked that spider-web-like patterns creep across the glass.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues
May 21, 2013

Fear and incarceration, from Kampala to Nagoya

"I was stopped by two men in a government-registered vehicle, blindfolded and dragged off the street. They took me away to a house in a place I did not know. I was forced into a room with blood all over the walls and floor, where two men lay. I couldn't tell if they were dead or alive. They had been...
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
May 19, 2013

Family drama is reimagined for today's Japan

"Kazoku Game (The Family Game)," directed by the late Yoshimitsu Morita and released in 1983, remains a movie milestone. A cynical black comedy, it presented to the world a distillation of the less edifying social outcomes of Japan's postwar economic miracle. The Numata family are invaded by a private...
Japan Times
JAPAN
May 17, 2013

11 women in Diet decry Hashimoto

A bipartisan group of female lawmakers Thursday called for Osaka Mayor and Nippon Ishin no Kai (Japan Restoration Party) coleader Toru Hashimoto to retract and apologize for his abrasive comments justifying the sexual enslavement of females during the war and suggesting that U.S. servicemen in Okinawa...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 16, 2013

The comedy and drama of Takashi Fujii

At age 41, Takashi Fujii has quite the resume. In 2000 and 2001, he appeared on national broadcaster NHK's annual top-rated New Year's variety show, "Kohaku Utagassen" ("Red and White Song Battle"); he toured abroad as a pop singer in 2004, including shows in Los Angeles and Shanghai; and in 2009 he...
Japan Times
JAPAN
May 16, 2013

Pair log off, hit street to meet, hear real people

Once addicted to a social-networking service, 27-year-old Lim Moon Hyang suddenly got tired of responding to instantaneous feedback from her online friends and realized with terror just how deep her SNS obsession ran.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHO'S WHO
May 14, 2013

Czech promoter sings way to cultural identity

For singer Eva Miklas Takamine, who also has been head of the Czech Center in Tokyo since March, singing both Czech and Japanese songs is a way of expressing her identity.
Japan Times
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
May 13, 2013

It ain't easy being a bilingual girl

This bilingual thing ... they say that it's a both curse and a blessing. Watakushigotode kyōshukudesuga (私事で恐縮ですが, A thousand pardons for having the gall to talk about myself), but I think of it more like a stigma. It's not the same for millenials — they were born and raised in a kinder...
Reader Mail
May 12, 2013

Price of peace with North Korea

Regarding the May 8 front-page AFP article "N. Korea moves missiles from coast" and related stories: Is it better to rent or own? It's an age-old debate and one where the White House has drawn a line in the sand right along the 38th Parallel.
Japan Times
WORLD
May 11, 2013

Genesis of a brawl: Decades of Sherpa resentment fuel confrontation on Mount Everest

It's an irresistible contrast. On the one hand, modern mountaineering superstars with their blogs and sponsorship deals, scrapping with outraged Sherpas on the slopes of Everest. On the other, one of the defining images of the 20th century, the photograph of Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary standing...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
May 11, 2013

There are plenty more fish jokes in the sea

The Go Fish! Foundation is an international organization for the protection of fish, their parents, family and friends. Go Fish! rescues, rehabilitates and gives sanctuary to fish in need.
Japan Times
Reference / Q&A
May 10, 2013

How signs of a 'lost continent' came into JAMSTEC's underwater view

The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and the Brazilian government announced Tuesday the discovery of a large mass of granite on the seafloor near Rio de Janero — a landmark finding that suggests a continent may have once existed there.

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