Search - life-columns

 
Menu
Search
 
December 21, 2024
 

Today's print edition

Home Delivery
Subscribe for more access
376 results
Sort by: Relevance Newest Oldest
After adjusting your search parameters, press Enter on your keyboard or click on the red magnifying glass to run your query again.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 31, 2016

Looking back on Cy Twombly

For "Cy Twombly Photographs: Lyrical Variations" Chiba Prefecture's Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art brings together exactly 100 photographs, chronologically arranged to span the length of the artist's career. A selection of prints, paintings and sculptures are also being shown, to be reconsidered...
Japan Times
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Aug 15, 2015

Psychology is where real radiation risks lie

Misinformation breeds discrimination. As if it wasn't enough to experience the trauma of a nuclear bomb, many hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) also faced appalling discrimination.
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Jan 17, 2015

Longevity, genetics and the whale

The oldest person in the world — and the oldest ever Japanese person — is Misao Okawa. She lives in Osaka and is 116. She'll be 117 in March.
OLYMPICS / ROBERT WHITING'S 1964 OLYMPICS RETROSPECTIVE
Oct 24, 2014

Negative impact of 1964 Olympics profound

The 1964 Tokyo Olympics had a profound impact on the capital city and the nation. In the final installment of a five-part series running this month, best-selling author Robert Whiting, who lived in Japan at the time, focuses on the environmental and human impact that resulted from hosting the event....
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / OUR PLANET EARTH
Feb 24, 2013

One former student's inspiring path to success

Seeing fewer years ahead and more behind me as a teacher, I often think back over the students who have passed through my classrooms and wonder how many will truly make a difference in the world.
COMMENTARY / Japan / SENTAKU MAGAZINE
Jan 14, 2013

Our menacing infrastructure

"Expressway tunnels as well as other infrastructure throughout Japan are nearing the crisis stage," warns a university professor who is a member of an advisory body for the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Dec 11, 2011

It takes a supersize brain to drive a London taxi

Visitors to Japan often comment on the way taxi doors open as you approach — at the touch of a button by the driver; and that those drivers generally wear smart white gloves. I apologize for the competitive tone, but there is something far more remarkable about London taxis: their drivers.
JAPAN / History / JAPAN TIMES GONE BY
Apr 3, 2011

Tragic echoes from the past

Prior to the Tohoku-Kanto earthquake and tsunami of March 11, two similar seismic events — both followed by tsunami — have recently wrought destruction on the northeastern coast of Japan's main island of Honshu. This week and next, we dig into the archives of The Japan Times and a forerunner later...
LIFE / Travel / BACKSTREET STORIES
Nov 28, 2010

Eats, shoots and leaves in Hakusan

It's hunting season in Tokyo. I kit up and trek out to the Hakusan area of Bunkyo Ward, hoping to shoot (with camera) the wild shades of autumn.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Sep 4, 2010

Campaigning to save the languages of Okinawa

Two stops on Naha's monorail from the tourist trinket shops of Kokusai-dori lies Sakaemachi, a tightly packed warren of tiny stalls and drinking dens. For outsiders like 40-year-old Byron Fija, it takes a measure of confidence to venture to this part of Okinawa, but as he passes the open-air tables of...
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Dec 13, 2009

How to survive a 'fearful age'?

The other day I attended a preview screening of "The Road," the new film of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic 2006 novel of the same name.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 13, 2009

Berlusconi's scandals are no laughing matter

ROME — Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's political and sexual exploits make headlines around the world, and not just in the tabloid press. These stories would be no more than funny — which they are certainly are — if they were not so damaging to Italy and revelatory of the country's immobile...
COMMENTARY
Aug 11, 2009

Seven topics for a summer day

LONDON — As Japanese lawmakers campaign for the Aug. 30 Lower House election, British members of Parliament are in recess and Prime Minister Gordon Brown is on holiday. Papers and weeklies are scraping the barrel for something to write about. Many fill their columns with so much sports that foreign...
Japan Times
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Aug 13, 2008

Foundering 'flagships'

It's often said what a privilege it is to attend a birth, and so it was in July that I felt lucky to witness the moments after the birth — by hatching — of a Green Turtle.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Jun 11, 2008

Of Darwin and Mishima . . .

If I said that I met Darwin last week, you might think I'd gone crazy.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Apr 30, 2008

Do bacteria make the man (or woman or child)?

What happens when Japanese people start eating a Western diet? Could it mean that their famed long life span starts to decline?
Japan Times
JAPAN / Science & Health / NATURAL SELECTIONS
Jan 9, 2008

Can we be forever young?

Jeanette Winterson's latest novel, "The Stone Gods," is set in the future on a distant planet whose resources have been over- exploited by colonizing humans.
COMMENTARY
Jan 6, 2008

Embodiment of Pakistan's paradoxes

LOS ANGELES — A gift given to me years ago from Benazir Bhutto, an elegantly decorated wood jewelry box slathered in glossy lacquer, still adorns a sideboard in our home.
LIFE / Lifestyle / MATTER OF COURSE
Dec 16, 2004

Reflections on rich learnings we all shared

When I began writing this column, I thought it would be a one-year gig. My editors thought so too. But things went well, and for nearly four years now I've reported in this space about my children's experiences in Japanese school.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle / ON THE BOOK TRAIL
Jun 26, 2003

"Follow Me Down," "Frank and the Chamber of Fear"

"Follow Me Down," Julie Hearn, Oxford University Publishing; July 2003; 224 pp. Strange things are happening in the basement of an old house in East London -- and not for the first time. The floor has parted, forming a kind of channel, and faces from the past are floating in it in an endless stream....
COMMUNITY
Feb 9, 2003

How green is your green?

What a difference a decade makes.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Jun 20, 2002

The ants' workaday world is wherever you look

Despite the name, I didn't see any ants in Antarctica, though it's the only place I've been that I haven't seen any. Everywhere else, from Alaska to Australia, from Norway to New Zealand, I have encountered them. Ants are an extraordinarily numerous and successful group.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / NATURE TRAVEL
Jun 11, 2002

On the pagoda path of the Irrawaddy

"On the road to Mandalay, Where the flyin' fishes play, An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the bay." -- Rudyard Kipling.
LIFE / Travel
Jun 26, 2001

The temples of the Nile

To float down the Nile, stopping at the temples, sleeping on my ship -- this was my desire and now I am in a stateroom on the Cheops I, a floating hotel rather than a mere boat, looking at the wharf at Aswan and reading Flaubert's journal of a similar voyage he made in 1849. I notice many of the same...
COMMUNITY
Dec 10, 2000

Iron chef champ's book hailed best in the world

One of Katsuyo Kobayashi's strengths is that she is 100 percent reliable. With 140 books published to date, even the most inept cook can take home her latest compilation of recipes and come up trumps every time. Not only are they easy to make, good to eat and affordable, but joy of joys, some are now...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / PERSONALITY PROFILE
Nov 12, 2000

Robert Whiting

For the last 50 years Japan has come under intense Western scrutiny from many quarters. Scholars, writers, professional men and women in different pursuits have contributed observations and analyses of Japanese thoughts and lifestyles and behavior. Bob Whiting crafted a way of his own to add to the body...
JAPAN
Nov 7, 2000

American fears for ecology on his island

To Japanese elsewhere, Jack Moyer may be a "gaijin," but to the people of Miyake Island, he is fellow islander Jack-san.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 22, 1999

'Advance Australia fair' takes on a whole new meaning

"There goes another shiftless Aboriginal," said the Pioneer bus driver to those of us taking the half-day tour of Alice Springs. "We give them cars, they drive them till they're out of petrol, then, bloody hell, they just leave the bloody things by the side of the road."
EDITORIALS
Jan 6, 1999

Paying for our technology fetish

Most people must have heard about the so-called "Year 2000 problem," or Y2K, as the turn-of-the-millennium computer glitch is known in techno-speak. Newspaper columns are filled with warnings of pandemonium in banking systems, airport control towers and other vital public facilities, just because computers,...
Japan Times
WORLD / Politics
Jul 8, 2022

For Boris Johnson, a tumultuous tenure ends with a messy exit

The risk-taking bravado of Britain's colorful prime minister was not enough to compensate for his shortcomings, or overcome a catastrophic loss of party support.
Mother hopes for reunion with daughter ensnared by Tokyo host clubs
The Kabukicho district in Tokyo, where the daughter of a woman in her 60s fell deeply into the host club culture.
43-year-old man arrested over Kitakyushu McDonald's stabbings
A McDonald's outlet in Kitakyushu where two teens were stabbed, one fatally, on Saturday. Police arrested a 43-year-old suspect on Thursday morning.
National Police Agency panel calls for stricter rules against host clubs
The streets of Tokyo's Kabukicho entertainment district in 2020. Consultations over matters relating to host clubs have been increasing every year at police stations nationwide, according to the National Police Agency.
Nippon Steel to join iron ore mine project in Canada
Nippon Steel headquarters in Tokyo
Bank of Japan opts for caution as Trump factor and wage concerns weigh
Bank of Japan Gov. Kazuo Ueda holds a news conference after a BOJ policy meeting in Tokyo on Thursday.
A year of Oscar wins and a quiet push for diversity
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Evil Does Not Exist,” released in Japanese theaters in April, sharply dramatizes the clash between rural and urban values. The film won five awards at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, including the second-place Silver Lion prize.
Curiosity didn’t kill the meme: Why cats still rule Japanese YouTube
A screen shot from YouTube user @lagelda shows the simplicity of going viral in Japan in 2024: A cat dancing to EDM in front of a green screen.
With rare Asia carrier deployment, France seeks greater interoperability
The flight deck of the French Navy's Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier during a stop at Changi Naval Base in Singapore in May 2019
Taiwan’s bullet train a testament to shinkansen’s export potential
A Taiwan High Speed Rail bullet train arrives at Nangang Station in the city of Taipei.
Looking for ways to be charitable in Japan? Give the gift of reading.
Book Santa is a program that delivers books to children in need for Christmas, but it also operates year-round.

Podcast

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.
Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Longform

Yasuyuki Yoshida stirs a brew in a fermentation tank at his brewery in Hakusan.
The quake that shook Noto's sake brewing tradition
By Alex K.T. Martin

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

mission sustainability vol.12 : Kose Corp.Kose takes pride in creating beauty in the world
mission sustainability vol.12 : Kose Corp.Kose takes pride in creating beauty in the world

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTS note

Read more

SUPPLEMENTS BINDER