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CULTURE / Books
Dec 30, 1999

Japanese politics, a model democracy

JAPANESE DEMOCRACY: Power, Coordination and Performance, by Bradley Richardson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. 325 pp.. $17. Do the revisionists have any clothes? Bradley Richardson argues that the interpretations of Japan popularized by the revisionist school do not bear scrutiny and that...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / 20 QUESTIONS
Oct 7, 2022

Yoshio Osakabe: ‘There are probably a lot of old fans who actually don't want Murakami to win the Nobel’

Coined 'Harukisuto,' or 'Haruki-ists,' for their passionate devotion to Haruki Murakami, one fan talks about the joy he gets from the work of one of Japan's most-treasured authors.
Japan Times
WORLD
Aug 15, 2022

Salman Rushdie off ventilator and 'road to recovery has begun'

Rushdie was set to deliver a lecture on the United States' role as a haven for targeted artists when a man rushed the stage and stabbed him.
Japan Times
JAPAN / History / THE LIVING PAST
Jun 19, 2022

How the Jewish community found a home in Japan

A bestseller from 1970 compares and contrasts two peoples more different than alike, and yet both sharing a sense of uniqueness.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
May 16, 2020

The suspended traveler’s reading list

Travel writing can change your life, or at least nudge it in a different direction. In these troubled times, it can also console and inspire.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Nov 8, 2019

'Dr. Hoffmann's Sanatorium': Delving deep into the weird world of Kafka

Playwright Kazumi Kobayashi, better known as Keralino Sandorovich, unveils his latest play, in which a fictional discovery of a lost Franz Kafka novel is made
JAPAN / History / Defining the Heisei Era
Oct 27, 2018

Defining the Heisei Era: When anime and manga went global

The Heisei Era commenced after two gods fell in rapid succession. The first, Emperor Hirohito, was no longer officially a god, having repudiated his quasi-divine status under the terms of Japan's surrender in World War II, but he remained god-like in stature. His January death in 1989 at age 87 signaled...
Japan Times
BUSINESS / Markets
Jul 1, 2018

Is bitcoin creator writing a book? Cryptic note indicates yes

Is the unknown creator of bitcoin writing a book about it?
Japan Times
JAPAN
Nov 24, 2016

Board examines the future direction of news coverage

Identity of The Japan Times
“Days at the Morisaki Bookshop” centers on a woman who overcomes past difficulties by finding comfort and human connection at her uncle's charming bookstore.
CULTURE / Books
Aug 19, 2023

Satoshi Yagisawa’s novel has all the charm of a Jimbocho bookshop

“Days at the Morisaki Bookshop" is a heartwarming coming-of-age tale that will delight fans of Japanese literature.
National Forest and Wild Fauna Service personnel check on a sea lion, amidst rising cases bird flu infections in Peru in February 2023.
WORLD / Science & Health
Aug 31, 2023

After racing across continents, bird flu threatens Antarctica

Unlike earlier versions of bird flu, H5N1 has also spread widely in wild birds and routinely spilled over into wild mammals.
Commercial fishermen form the word "SOS" to spread the message about ocean acidification caused by fossil fuel emissions, in Homer, Alaska, in 2009. Ocean acidification is one of nine planetary boundaries that determine life on Earth.
ENVIRONMENT / Earth science
Sep 14, 2023

Humanity pushing Earth far beyond 'safe operating space': study

Six of nine planetary boundaries — within which the world is livable for most species, including our own — are already deep in the red zone.
History recorded the thoughts and actions of rulers and warlords, but what did the average folk think in that time? Were their days filled with angst, passion or poignancy?
JAPAN / History
Sep 17, 2023

Writers find a new muse in the 20th century: the ordinary person

The past at its very best spread its benefits thinly, leaving the masses to make the best of things beyond the reach of civilization’s light.
Bank of Japan Gov. Kazuo Ueda meets with European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde and U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell at the Jackson Hole economic symposium in Moran, Wyoming, on Aug. 25.
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 25, 2023

As geopolitical risks grow, businesses are slow to respond

Businesses need to integrate geopolitical risk into their decision-making in an ever-transforming world.
The question of when a person dies is a scientific and moral issue with far-reaching implications in the area of organ transplants, among others.
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 16, 2023

When does science say we die?

Debates about when a human being dies are yet unresolved, with profound implications for the medical profession and areas such as organ transplants.
A still from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
PODCAST / deep dive
Dec 14, 2023

Big in Japan 2023: Anime, Murakami and The Legend of Zelda

Our guests tell us why anime dominated in 2023, which books stood out among a lackluster crowd and why the Zelda franchise is experiencing a renaissance.
Columbia University researchers have found that on average, bottled water contain 110,000 to 370,000 tiny plastic particles in each liter, 90% of them nanoplastics.
ENVIRONMENT / Sustainability
Jan 9, 2024

Bottled water has more plastic particles than previously thought

The discovery of nanoplastics, which could not be detected until recently, suggests that health concerns linked to plastic pollution may be dramatically underestimated.
Japan's fall to No. 4 in the global economic rankings reflects an aging population and declining resources.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Feb 20, 2024

Japan slips in the global economic rankings: So what’s next?

The IMF has forecast that India will overtake Japan economically in 2026 and Germany in 2027.
Since September 2022, Patagonia has allocated profits amounting to $71 million to environmental initiatives that include stopping a proposed mine in Alaska and conserving land in South America, as well as helping to elect pro-environment U.S. Democrats.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 6, 2024

The competitive edge of doing good in business

Are companies that give all profits to charity also doing good for their business? Some examples show they are, and that this model is worth pursuing.
The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine brain activity.
WORLD / Science & Health
Mar 12, 2024

Study of polyglots offers insight on brain's language processing

The brain's language network consists of a few areas situated in its frontal and temporal lobes.
“Butter” author Asako Yuzuki was inspired by the real-life story of Kanae Kijima, who was nicknamed the “Black Widow” and the “Konkatsu Killer” by the media for killing three men she dated to maintain her luxurious lifestyle of gourmet meals and a high-end cooking school.
CULTURE / Books
Apr 12, 2024

Asako Yuzuki's 'Butter' is a heady serving of food culture and feminism

The author's foodie femme fatale character was inspired by a real-life "black widow" case that caught the public's attention in 2009.
Japan, once a secondary player in Southeast Asian regional integration, now needs to balance strengthening ties with ASEAN while navigating its position between the U.S. and China.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Aug 8, 2024

Japan takes a soft diplomatic approach to ASEAN ties

Shifting dynamics in Southeast Asia are compelling Japan to carefully navigate its role amid intense U.S.-China competition.
In Hiromi Kawakami’s novel “The Third Love,” modern-day Tokyoite Riko travels between life in 19th-century Edo (old Tokyo) and the courts of the Heian Period, examining her relationship with her husband in the process.
CULTURE / Books
Sep 6, 2024

'The Third Love' is a time-bending meditation on romantic love

Hiromi Kawakami's novel draws from “The Tales of Ise" and “Takaoka’s Travels” to immerse readers in an intertextual exploration of who we are in and out of love.
Men use a stole to cover themselves from the sun as they wait in a line outside a polling station to cast their votes during the sixth phase of India's general election in Bhubaneswar, India, on May 25.
WORLD / Politics
Sep 16, 2024

Surviving a climate disaster isn’t likely to change how you vote

If people are in fact casting ballots based on their experiences of disasters, it appears to be a small number of them.
South Korean author Han Kang, the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, attends a press conference, in Seoul in November.
CULTURE / Books
Oct 11, 2024

Han Kang’s Nobel win underscores essential role of translators as literary tastemakers

The trailblazing South Korean author was virtually unknown in the West just 10 years ago — then came Deborah Smith’s translation of "The Vegetarian."
The discovery of the Navaornis hestiae fills the intermediate step in evolution between the first bird-like dinosaurs, such as Archaeopteryx, and living birds.
WORLD / Science & Health
Nov 15, 2024

'One-of-a-kind' fossil from Brazil reveals birds' brain evolution

The fossil discovery filled in a gap of 70 million years in the understanding of the evolution of avian neuroanatomy.
For “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” translated into English by Philip Gabriel, Haruki Murakami confronts the ghosts who won't leave him alone.
CULTURE / Books
Nov 19, 2024

Haruki Murakami's 'The City and Its Uncertain Walls' gives deep deja vu

“The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” newly translated into English, is an explicit rerun of the author’s older works with an alternate ending.
A fossil footprint in northern Kenya hypothesized to have been created by a Homo erectus individual, is seen in this photograph released on Nov. 28.
WORLD / Science & Health
Dec 3, 2024

Fossil footprints in Kenya show two ancient human species coexisted

The fossils provide the first evidence that Paranthropus boisei and Homo erectus shared the same landscape, literally crossing paths.
The skeleton of a mammoth, one of the large mammals that roamed North America during the last Ice Age, is displayed at the Mammoth Site where numerous mammoth fossils have been excavated, in Hot Springs, South Dakota, on Aug. 31, 2018.
WORLD
Dec 5, 2024

Mammoths topped the menu for North American Ice Age people

Scientists discovered that the woman's diet was mostly meat from megafauna — the largest animals in an ecosystem — with an emphasis on mammoths.

Longform

Visitors to Kyoto walk along a street near Kiyomizu Temple in April. A popular tourist spot, Kyoto has seen what locals feel to be an overwhelming amount of tourists in 2024.
Is Japan ready for 60 million tourists?