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COMMENTARY
Mar 10, 2008

Redundant royal honors provoke wonder

HONOLULU — Not every monarch is alike. It's true that many are mean and greedy and full of themselves — selfish squirrels who sock their ill-gotten gains beneath everyone's eyes overseas while they stick their political opponents into dark dank prisons — or graves. But some are comparatively mild,...
Japan Times
MORE SPORTS
Mar 10, 2008

Takahashi comes up short

NAGOYA — A nation watched. A nation waited. A nation hoped. . .
BASEBALL / BASEBALL BULLET-IN
Mar 9, 2008

Will 2008 season be as magical as 1964 campaign was?

Will the 2008 Japan pro baseball season, I wonder, be anything like 1964?
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Mar 9, 2008

Crown Prince could lead the way in effort for mutt emancipation

Next month, the environment ministry and the health ministry will jointly implement a new law that provides subsidies to local government health centers for the feeding of abandoned or captured dogs and cats. The money is designed to make it possible for these centers to take care of the animals an extra...
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / ON THE ROAD
Mar 9, 2008

World's carmakers head back to school

International car manufacturers know that the automobile as a symbol has lost some of its gloss for the younger generation. Today's young people want to take transportation in new directions. They have a more ecological, environmentally sustainable vision of transportation, and often it's so idealistic...
Japan Times
LIFE / COSPLAY CULTURE
Mar 9, 2008

School offers costume-play way to 'cool' English

Learning a foreign language is never easy, and for many it can even be a painful process.
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Mar 8, 2008

Muto nominated as BOJ chief; DPJ unsure

With Bank of Japan Gov. Toshihiko Fukui's term expiring in 11 days, the government and ruling bloc on Friday finally nominated one of his deputies, Toshiro Muto, to replace him at the central bank.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Mar 8, 2008

Devolution: hangin' around

Even after 15 years in Japan, I cannot avoid looking like the struggling, bumbling "gaijin." You know what I mean: the gaijin who has just gotten off the plane in Japan and is struggling with several huge bags of luggage, all of it too big, none with wheels, making you look like a small elephant in a...
Japan Times
BASKETBALL / BJ-LEAGUE NOTEBOOK
Mar 7, 2008

Diouf gives Broncos hope

Mamadou "Madou" Diouf is strong, swift and agile on the basketball court.
COMMENTARY
Mar 7, 2008

Ways to vanquish the culture of conflict

YEREVAN, Armenia — A trip to Armenia, where one of history's most neglected genocides was carried out, is a reminder of other examples of man's brutality to fellow human beings.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Mar 7, 2008

Dance or no dance, here's The Locust

The last time The Locust played Japan they took part in what would turn out to be At The Drive-In's first and final tour of the archipelago. Though it was the California foursome's second trip to this country, opening for the now defunct prog-emo group from "Hell Paso," Texas at Tokyo's Shibuya-AX in...
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / TOKYO FOOD FILE
Mar 7, 2008

Spain Iberico Bar Mon-Naka: Iberico comes to Monzen-Nakacho

It took a puzzlingly long time for Japan to catch on to the pleasures of the taperia. It should be a perfect fit since, after all, the exquisite Iberian custom of slowly whiling away the evening with tapas and drinks, one dish and one glass at a time, is so close in spirit to the izakaya tradition.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 6, 2008

Bolstering U.S.-ASEAN Cooperation

BANGKOK — The strategic presence of the United States in Southeast Asia takes two forms, both of which are interrelated: The relationship is institutionalized through the Pacific Command in Honolulu and then formalized through various hub-and-spoke agreements with member states of the 10-member Association...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Mar 6, 2008

The mathematics of music

So forward-looking that it's hard to categorize him — Is he an artist? A musician? A conceptualist? — Ryoji Ikeda makes the music that we'll lull the robots to sleep with when they ultimately try to take over. Or that we'll use to convince ourselves that we are the robots.
BUSINESS / SOUTH KOREAN JOURNALIST SYMPOSIUM
Mar 6, 2008

New leader's pragmatism to define policies

New South Korean President Lee Myung Bak will pursue a "pragmatic" foreign policy that will seek to rebuild ties with the United States and Japan while taking a "carrot-and-stick" approach to North Korea, journalists from South Korea told a symposium held in Tokyo just before his inauguration.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 5, 2008

Putin's unwilling executioner?

NEW YORK — The question that has dominated Russian politics, and world discussion of Russian politics — will he (Vladimir Putin) or won't he stay in power? — has now been settled. He will and he won't.
COMMENTARY
Mar 5, 2008

Sovereign funds rescue West

LONDON — Ten years ago some commentators, including myself, were forecasting that the age of Westernization was over and that the age of Easternization was about to begin. Capital and technology that had flowed from the West to the East for several centuries past was now about to start flowing the...
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / OLD NIC'S NOTEBOOK
Mar 5, 2008

In praise of the 'mountain whale'

Not long after I arrived in Tokyo for the first time in October 1962, Klaus Naumann — a childhood friend from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, in the rural southwest of England, who had come to Japan ahead of me (and is still here) — took me on a magical trip to the Izu Peninsula in Shizuoka Prefecture....
Reader Mail
Mar 4, 2008

Taking matters in her own hands

This year I experienced my first Japanese Valentine's Day. More than two weeks before the event, I was looking forward to it with confident anticipation. This year I wouldn't sit around waiting for some guy to extend romantic greetings. I would make chocolates for all the boys in my office, and for...
COMMUNITY / Issues / JUST BE CAUSE
Mar 4, 2008

Dusting off the A-word

Causes are what activists take up as a matter of course. But in Japan, just doing that is a challenge, given the general aversion towards activism here.
COMMENTARY
Mar 3, 2008

Oscar for patient diplomacy

LOS ANGELES — For much of the first few years of the new millennium, North Korea was viewed as the most probable nation-state aggressor in Asia.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 3, 2008

Keynes and the end of economic history

PARIS — Some academic works, for reasons that are at least partly obscure, leave a persistent trace in intellectual history. Such is the case with John Maynard Keynes' paper "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren."
BUSINESS / JAPANESE PERSPECTIVES
Mar 3, 2008

No place for celebrity currencies in global jungle

Just recently I took part in a very interesting discussion program for NHK television in which economists and strategists from around the world came together to debate the state of the global economy and what kind of a beating the financial markets were liable to take as a result of the ongoing subprime...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Mar 2, 2008

Will Japan's insular mindset ever be inclusive of others?

First of two parts
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHEN EAST MARRIES WEST
Mar 1, 2008

Dialects: How to addle your brains

The verb, "addle," meaning to "make muddled or confused," can be used into only two contexts. This is from a linguistics prof who taught me years ago.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Mar 1, 2008

How to put on futon underwear

My neighbor Kazu-chan complains that the Shiraishi International Villa guests have taken the bed sheets down to the beach again. The local minshuku calls me up now and then and asks me to explain Japanese bedding to foreign guests who are asking for sheets for their futons again.

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