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Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Mar 8, 2013

Aspiring thespians get help in realizing dreams

If you had a son or daughter who announced they wanted to be a stage actor, whatever would you say to them?
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 6, 2013

Power is increasingly fleeting

In 2009, during his first address before a joint session of Congress, U.S. President Barack Obama championed a budget that would serve as a blueprint for the country's future through ambitious investments in energy, health care and education. "This is America," the new president proclaimed. "We don't...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 28, 2013

'The Word in Art: As is Painting so is Writing, as is Writing so is Painting'

Artists have added text to artworks for centuries, usually as a way to enhance or explain a concept. Tadanori Yokoo, however, combines painting and words in ways that often have no purpose at all. Sometimes, lettering is chosen for purely aesthetic purposes — to amplify the visual impact of the work;...
LIFE / Digital
Feb 27, 2013

Wearable tech will see, follow us everywhere

Apple has already transformed two industries — music and computing. Now, as the company reportedly attempts the redefinition of the watch — one of man's oldest pieces of technology — the next phase of the techno revolution is moving into clear view: Welcome to the age of "wearable tech," with a...
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 27, 2013

Five myths about picking a pope

Misconceptions abound about how 117 cardinals, gathering from across the globe inside the Vatican's Sistine Chapel, will elect a new pope next month.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 27, 2013

Stuck in a rut: why can't the U.S. move forward?

"Your dearest wish is for our state structure and ideological system never to change, to remain as they are for centuries. But history is not like that. Every system either finds away to develop or else collapses."
WORLD / Science & Health
Feb 24, 2013

U.S. federally funded research to be freely available

The White House moved Friday to make nearly all federally funded research freely available to the public, the latest advance in a long-running battle over access to research that exploded into view last month after the suicide of free-information activist Aaron Swartz.
Japan Times
WORLD / Crime & Legal
Feb 23, 2013

The stalking cure: rehabilitating an all too common menace

When forensic psychiatrist Frank Farnham first meets a stalker, he doesn't judge. Some of his clients have done awful things. They have intimidated, pursued and terrified their victims.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Feb 21, 2013

Redefining conventions of the play

Without doubt, Takahiro Fujita is the most prominent newcomer in the world of Japanese contemporary theater. To a considerable extent that's because the 27-year-old playwright/director has an unusual trademark style — to create works that often have the same lyrical phrases and series of movements...
Japan Times
JAPAN / Politics
Feb 21, 2013

For Abe, overcoming perceptions top job at Obama summit

When Prime Minister Shinzo Abe travels to Washington this week for a summit with U.S. President Barack Obama, his first job may be to convince the president he's not a rightwing fanatic seeking confrontation in East Asia, but rather a calm partner who can work with the Americans to maintain peace and...
Japan Times
ASIA PACIFIC
Feb 20, 2013

Chinese struggle in 'airpocalypse'

China's toxic air pollution is exacting a toll, as more people suffer coughing attacks and are forced to stay indoors, especially anywhere near Beijing.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Feb 19, 2013

Sewing words for thought

Some words can evoke powerful images, values and stereotypes that have crept into our subconsciousness to sometimes dictate the way we think or behave. For Ruri Clarkson, this is something that needs to be challenged in Japan, and which she does herself with art.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WEEK 3
Feb 17, 2013

Fukushima radiation threatens to wreak woodland havoc

For Yuji Hoshino, mushrooms were a way of life. The 50-year-old farmer grew up watching his father raise shiitake mushrooms on their land at the foot of the mountains in Sano, southern Tochigi Prefecture.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 14, 2013

Go with the flow from representational to abstract

For five years starting in 2007, Shinpei Kusanagi (b.1973) made monthly serialized paintings to accompany installments of Teru Miyamoto's novel "Mizu no Katachi" ("The Shape of Water") in the magazine éclat. Text and image had little to do with one another, though the small, standard format paintings...
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / TECH_JAPAN
Feb 13, 2013

Three gadgets from CES that you can take on the road.

Among the many products released at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas each year there are often some that stand out for being particularly innovative, and this year's CES was no disappointment.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 31, 2013

Seeing the wood for Enku's Buddhas

While a golden age for secular arts, Japan's Edo Period (1603-1867) is broadly dismissed by art historians as a period of stagnation for Buddhist sculpture.
JAPAN
Jan 25, 2013

Noted scholar Kyoko Iriye Selden dies in U.S.

Kyoko Iriye Selden, a scholar and teacher at Cornell University, died in Ithaca, New York, on Sunday at the age of 76 after contracting pneumonia.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jan 23, 2013

'Coriolanus' comes home — to Kyoto

It's a fair bet that many people at the Globe Theatre in London last May expected the Kyoto-based Chiten (Point) Company to present a stereotypically Japanese, samurai-style "Coriolanus," complete with taiko drums and period armor.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 23, 2013

Woman's tragedy speaks to Indian aspirations

It's common these days for people to compare India with China and conclude that maybe democracy isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Japan Times
WORLD / Politics
Jan 21, 2013

Lincoln set the bar high for inaugural addresses

He first wrote out his speech in longhand. He had it printed and then cut the text into 27 snippets that he pasted on a sheet of paper. He changed three words and added 15 commas and semicolons.
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
Jan 19, 2013

Zen and the cross-cultural art of tree-climbing

In the upstairs meeting room of a camping lodge in Komagane, Nagano Prefecture, two women and about 20 men walked slowly and intently in circles one rainy day last November. At the front of the room, a weathered and wiry Englishman intoned the sort of instructions a yoga aficionado would find familiar....
CULTURE / Film
Jan 17, 2013

Nick Bornoff on 'Senjo no Meri Kurisumasu (Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence)'

Internationally acclaimed for their formal style and power, Nagisa Oshima's films have always dealt with controversial issues which Japan's Establishment would rather see swept under the carpet. Based upon a famous Laurens van der Post novel (The Seed and the Sower), Oshima's "Senjo no Meri Kurisumasu...
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 14, 2013

Co-opting militias takes priority over Benghazi

As the United States struggles to understand last September's attack on its diplomatic mission in Benghazi, which took the lives of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, a formal investigation has not even been opened in Libya — and likely never will be.
EDITORIALS
Jan 13, 2013

A website to combat bullying

Bullying has remained a pernicious problem in the Japanese school system. Students are reluctant to report it and teachers and administrators reluctant to admit it. A new proactive approach by the Saitama Prefectural Board of Education has the potential to start putting a stop to the problem through...
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 8, 2013

U.S. imagination goes wild regarding Iranian 'threat'

Reading the text of a bill that was recently signed into law by U.S. President Barack Obama would instill fear in the hearts of ordinary Americans.
JAPAN / Politics
Jan 5, 2013

Nippon Mirai's sole Diet member to replace Kada

Shiga Gov. Yukiko Kada officially declared Friday she will step down as head of the small political group Nippon Mirai no To (Tomorrow Party of Japan), apologizing to her constituents "for having caused worries" and pledging to "solely focus" on her gubernatorial duties.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 3, 2013

Western influences on Suda's nostalgic East

The fusion of East and West is a major theme in 20th-century art, even though, in important ways, the two don't mix. What seems at one point to be their ostensible unification, appears in another as discordant. Such inconsonance lurks in the background at the retrospective of Kunitaro Suda's work at...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Dec 31, 2012

Supreme copout: twisted justification for guns

Suppose a Seung-Hui Cho, Jared Lee Loughner, James Eagan Holmes or an Adam Lanza shot and killed or seriously wounded any of the families of John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Would any of them have given different opinions in their 2008 and 2010 decisions?...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Dec 30, 2012

Landscaping the doors of perception in Japan

ZEN GARDENS: The Complete Works of Shunmyo Masuno, Japan's Leading Garden Designer, by Mira Locher. Tuttle Publishing, 2012, 224 pp., $39.95 (hardcover) Although the term zen-tei (Zen garden) exists in Japanese, its usage is a largely Western one, first coined by the American garden scholar Lorraine...

Longform

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