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Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Aug 25, 2012

Conductor-composer hits right note with Tokyo children's choir

Steven Morgan creates instant harmony with the wave of his hand. For 15 years, he has been conducting some of Tokyo's leading English choirs, bringing the pleasure of choral music performances to both singers and audiences alike.
COMMENTARY
Aug 23, 2012

Australia's call for thoughts on Iraq

On Aug. 16 a group of Australians, led by former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and former Chief of the Defense Force Gen. Peter Gration, launched a call for an inquiry into how and why Australia joined the Iraq war in 2003. The goal is not to rake over old coals, but to improve how war and peace decisions...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / LABOR PAINS
Aug 21, 2012

Tepco liable for contract workers' safety in Fukushima

'Usually I spend New Year's Eve eating New Year's soba and go with my whole family to listen to the watch-night bell. But this year, I will spend Dec. 31 and Jan. 1 working. I will see the first sunrise of the year looking out over the sea driving along the highway toward the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / VIEWS FROM THE STREET
Aug 21, 2012

Fujisawa, Kanagawa: What will you remember about the London Olympics?

Isabelle Provost
COMMENTARY
Aug 20, 2012

Tokyo's determined bid for the 2020 Olympics

Tokyo's "Candidate City" bid for the 2020 Olympic Games was officially recognized in May by the IOC (International Olympic Committee), and it looks quite natural in view of Tokyo's reputation as a safe, clean and culturally rich megalopolis.
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Aug 19, 2012

Monster parents make matters worse for their children and teachers

In the West they hover and swoop. In Japan they stalk and are known to strike. We all have them and some of us have been them. And in recent years the media, both social and antisocial, have put them under the magnifying glass of criticism.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Aug 19, 2012

Japanese-Americans: life after the war and internment

AFTER CAMP: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics, by Greg Robinson. University of California Press, 2012, 328 pp., $27.95 (paperback) "A Jap is a Jap."
LIFE / WEEK 3
Aug 19, 2012

Scholar Tenshin Okakura's seaside pavilion, destroyed in tsunami, witnesses a new dawn

Rokkakudo, a small, six-sided wooden pavilion that overlooks the Pacific Ocean from a low rocky headland in northern Ibaraki Prefecture, is by no means Tenshin Okakura's most important legacy. That honor would go to "The Book of Tea," a now-classic dissertation on traditional Japanese aesthetics that...
SOCCER / PREMIER REPORT
Aug 18, 2012

Man United takes gamble on van Persie

It was, at the same time, another superb bit of business by Arsenal and a brilliant coup by Manchester United two days before the new season begins.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 18, 2012

U.S. religious liberty feeling the weight of so many faiths

In the United States, Muslim women trying to maintain modesty should get female-only hours at the public pool, right?
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 16, 2012

Spillover could force Washington to consider how to end Syria's war

"The beginning of wisdom," a Chinese saying goes, "is to call things by their right names." And the right name for what is happening in Syria — and has been for more than a year — is an all-out civil war.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Aug 15, 2012

Palestinian plight's Tohoku parallels

The civil war in Syria is not only affecting its civilians but also the Palestinian refugees living in exile there, and the situation is deteriorating, the head of a United Nations agency supporting the refugees said during a recent visit to Japan.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 15, 2012

Iran is not the cause of Syria's worsening crisis

We humans often make the mistake of not learning from history, even when it is recent. Civil war in the Levant is not a thing of the distant past. With Syria descending into worsening violence, the 15-year Lebanese civil war should provide frightening lessons of what happens when the fabric of a society...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Aug 14, 2012

Yokosuka rape victim takes fight for justice to U.S. courts

Australian Catherine Jane Fisher, who was raped by a U.S. Navy sailor in Yokosuka in 2002, has now taken her case for compensation all the way to the U.S. courts.
COMMENTARY
Aug 14, 2012

China betting on wrong side in Syrian conflict

On the weekend before last, the United Nations General Assembly voted, 133 to 12, for a resolution that condemned the violence in Syria and called for a "political transition that meets the aspirations of the Syrian people."
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / VIEWS FROM THE STREET
Aug 14, 2012

Osaka: What are your plans for the Obon holidays?

Etsuko Nomura
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Aug 12, 2012

Pyongyang: the Orwellian city through its architecture

PYONGYANG ARCHITECTURAL AND CULTURAL GUIDE, by Philipp Meuser. DOM publishers, 2012, 368 pp., $49.95 (paperback) Imagine an easy-to-navigate, pedestrian- and car-friendly city with enough space to avoid the kind of congestion that typically threatens to choke similar places worldwide — a city whose...
Japan Times
LIFE
Aug 12, 2012

Japan's Paralympians overcome adversity by leaps, bounds and innovative design

When Oscar Pistorius made his dramatic debut in the men's 400-meter race in London last Saturday — becoming the first double amputee to compete alongside able-bodied athletes in Olympics history — some people might have wondered if the South African's artificial legs gave him a competitive edge over...
Japan Times
OLYMPICS / LONDON POSTCARD
Aug 9, 2012

Grenada's James provides Olympics with feel-good story

Some events are worth repeating in print shortly after the story originally appears, moments that highlight the best of the human spirit.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Aug 7, 2012

Poisons in the Pacific: Guam, Okinawa and Agent Orange

The day after 19-year-old Sgt. Leroy Foster arrived on Guam's Andersen Air Force Base, one of America's largest Pacific military installations, in 1968, he was assigned to what his superior officers called "vegetation control duties."
COMMUNITY / Voices / VIEWS FROM THE STREET
Aug 7, 2012

Nagoya: What is the best thing about cosplay?

This past weekend marked the 10th anniversary of the World Cosplay Summit in Nagoya, so The Japan Times took to the streets to pick cosplayers' brains about why they choose to devote hours upon hours of their lives to designing, making and — finally — acting out their fantasies in elaborate costumes....
Japan Times
LIFE
Aug 5, 2012

Restoration of temple 'harder than building it'

The year was 1735, and on the plains of Menuma in present-day Saitama Prefecture, master builder Hayashi Masakiyo was going from village to village assembling a group of top-class carpenters, engravers, painters and other artisans.

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