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COMMENTARY / World
Dec 25, 2000

Flexibility the key to success of alliance

Foreign policy focuses on change. New leaders, new technologies, new conditions -- all create the need for new policies. Experts are always planning for contingencies -- the crisis to come -- and when they hit it's usually because governments failed to recognize the new realities that created them. ...
JAPAN
Dec 23, 2000

Kagawa folks get to bottom of their 'udon' bowls in more ways than one

TAKAMATSU, Kagawa Pref. -- As a native of a prefecture famous for Sanuki "udon" (wheat noodles), Kazutoshi Tao thought udon was a simple component of daily life -- until he visited a place where customers whip up their own variety.
JAPAN
Dec 22, 2000

TSE dives to 13,500 in high-tech sales spree

Tokyo stock prices continued to take a beating Thursday, as sharp declines on Wall Street overnight coupled with indications of a faltering economic recovery at home depressed the benchmark stock index to below the 13,500 mark, the lowest closing in over 23 months.
JAPAN
Dec 21, 2000

Shigenobu-linked premises searched

Police said Wednesday they have searched 10 locations, including the home of a 34-year-old assemblywoman in Tokyo's Shinagawa Ward, in connection with forged passports allegedly used by Fusako Shigenobu, the founder of the Japanese Red Army.
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 21, 2000

Time once again for Russia's perennial heating crisis

VLADIVOSTOK, Russia -- The communist central planners who designed modern Russia's infrastructure devised a system of boiling water kilometers from where it is needed, running it through aboveground pipes across a region where temperatures can drop as low as minus 40 C -- and expected this to warm the...
JAPAN
Dec 20, 2000

Soviets used POWs as pawns

During the 1955-56 negotiations on restoring Russo-Japanese relations, the Soviet Union used Japanese prisoners of war as "political hostages," according to Japanese diplomatic documents declassified Tuesday.
LIFE / Travel / NATURE TRAVEL
Dec 20, 2000

Walking along the edge of civilization

Done the Great Wall of China? Try the Great Wall of England. It's arguably the finest Roman monument north of the Alps.
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Dec 20, 2000

Glaciers prove ecological succession

That powerful forces have shaped the world we live in is somehow easier to grasp when one lives in a country wracked by earthquakes, dotted with calderas and pocked with active volcanoes.
CULTURE / Books
Dec 19, 2000

Making mush of Meadowlark

SHOPPING: A Novel, by Gavin Kramer. Soho Press, 2000, 216 pp., $22 (cloth). It's easy for a foreigner to feel like a freak in Japan -- tall, different, culturally unaware, linguistically tongue-tied. This wickedly clever novel of manners turns its lens on the foreign protagonist as spectacle, British...
JAPAN
Dec 19, 2000

Mori allots 250 billion yen toward IT 'revolution'

Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori on Monday unveiled the breakdown of a 700 billion yen special budget that places special emphasis on efforts to realize an information technology "revolution" in Japan.
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 18, 2000

Sharif deal puts pressure on Musharraf

ISLAMABAD -- Pakistanis were taken aback last week when they unexpectedly heard that former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, in military custody since the country's bloodless coup last year, suddenly left the country for exile in Saudi Arabia.
CULTURE / Music
Dec 17, 2000

Putting the double bass on top

Widely considered the greatest double bass soloist of our time, world-renowned virtuoso Gary Karr will perform tonight at Taishi Bunka Kaikan Hall in Hyogo Prefecture with the piano accompaniment of his long-time duo partner Harmon Lewis, one of the final concerts of his 11-city, 3-week tour of Japan....
CULTURE / Art
Dec 16, 2000

Op-ting out of the conventional frame

"Yellow-Green Spiral" by Jun Fujita, 2000, acrylic on board Op Art, pioneered by Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely in the '60s, creates the impression of swirling movement and tricks the eye into perceiving three dimensions. Optical discrepancy is achieved by placing the geometric shapes precisely onthe...
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 16, 2000

Africa's growing thirst for democracy

There is a saying among my people in Ghana: one head alone is not enough to decide. I often think of that when I hear people say that democracy is alien to Africa, or that Africans are "not ready" for democracy.
JAPAN
Dec 15, 2000

Bush expected to focus on Japan rather than China

Experts on Japanese-U.S. relations broadly see George W. Bush's victory in the U.S. presidential election as a good sign for Tokyo, as the Republican Party places relatively strong importance on Japan in its Asia policy, and the new administration is expected to take a less-confrontational approach to...
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Dec 14, 2000

Dining out in year-end style

With Christmas a mere 10 days away, it is unlikely that anyone has failed to make their arrangements for celebrations, either on the day itself or during the Yuletide run-up. However, just in time for the season of good cheer, overeating and loosening of purse strings, here are two places (opened in...
LIFE / Digital
Dec 13, 2000

Deck the halls with boughs of games

Video games used to be the No. 1 gift request of preteen boys alone, but not anymore. With the release of sophisticated hardware such as Sony's PlayStation 2 console, the audience for games has expanded to include older gamers, both male and female.
CULTURE / Art
Dec 10, 2000

Filling in the contours of a changing world

Sometimes people are disappointed with the quality of exhibitions visiting Japan, but there are no reservations about the superb drawings now at the Tobu Museum of Art.
CULTURE / Music
Dec 10, 2000

A feast of orchestral sound to take the chill off winter

Concertgoers could hardly escape noticing that the past month or so has been the season for hearing big symphony and opera orchestras from abroad. The Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Phil- harmonic, for example, were both here for weeks at the same time, and they weren't the only ones.
CULTURE / Music / PLAY BUTTON
Dec 8, 2000

Hanayo's gift wrapped in seductive complexity

With her mix of artifice, artistic discipline and sexual promise, no traditional figure is more ambiguous than the geisha.
LIFE / ALTERNATIVE LUXURIES
Dec 7, 2000

Traditions found anew

"It's only recently that the great mass of Indians have begun to feel that rising in the world and becoming rich was a good thing, a valuable thing," says Asha Amemiya.
CULTURE / Music
Dec 5, 2000

Blues for the new millennium

The new CD puts a contemporary spin on classic blues-rock. "It's a ticket to the show." That's how Canadian band leader Robin Suchy describes the newly released CD he produced with his 10-man blues band, the Howling Loochie Brothers.
EDITORIALS
Nov 28, 2000

Quit coddling NTT

The Telecommunications Council, an advisory panel to the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, has produced a preliminary report calling for stepped-up competition within the NTT group. The report, however, falls far short of expectations. The overall impression is that the panel is keen to minimize...
CULTURE / Books
Nov 28, 2000

Thunderstruck by the Asian ascent

THUNDER FROM THE EAST: Portrait of a Rising Asia, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000, 377 pp., $27.50. This is a mediocre potboiler of scant significance. One suspects that these Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters for The New York Times know a great deal more about...
ENVIRONMENT / OUR PLANET EARTH
Nov 27, 2000

Hague climate change talks getting lost in niggling details

They say "the devil is in the details," and so it was at The Hague recently during negotiations of the sixth Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Two weeks of stonewalling and hairsplitting, and we are really no closer to dealing with the global warming problem...
JAPAN
Nov 26, 2000

Town takes eco stride, refines used cooking oil for car fuel

NAGAHAMA, Shiga Pref. -- In an effort to generate business opportunities and improve the environment of this western Japan city, a group of small and medium-size businesses have launched a project to build equipment to refine used cooking oil for use in automobiles as an alternative fuel.
CULTURE / Art
Nov 19, 2000

Wake-up calls to the subconscious

Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) is the great painter of the enigma in our era and his work is now on exhibit at Tokyo's Bunkamura in one of the most comprehensive shows seen yet in Japan.
CULTURE / Music / HOGAKU TODAY
Nov 18, 2000

Autumn's rich hogaku harvest

If you've not yet had the opportunity to experience Japanese music and wish to do so, over the next six weeks some of the contemporary hogaku masters will offer a truly diverse variety of concerts, ranging from the classical to the modern.

Longform

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