Forty-five years spent living in the Kobe area as the American wife of a Japanese businessman must change a person. Yet Winnie Inui, 68, still welcomes visitors to her suburban home in Ashiya, Hyodo Prefecture, with a blanket of felicitous concern ("Enough tea, dear?") ...
American restaurateur Charles Roche, 62, credits his love of feting others to having grown up in the warm and noisy embrace of an extended Italian-American family in the Bronx. As part of a food-loving clan he jokingly refers to as "the Sopranos without the ...
Daniel Kelly's immaculate central Kyoto atelier is empty upon arrival, but soon the artist comes bounding in, extending warm greetings before leading a quick tour of the two-floor studio-living quarters. Then we're off again, dashing around the corner to check out his kura (warehouse)-cum-art ...
Although oceans cover 73 percent of the surface of the Earth, little is known about marine plant and animal biodiversity. To learn more about their future prospects for this special coverage of COP10 in Nagoya, The Japan Times spoke with Francois Simard, an expert on ...
Key data drawn from numerous quoted sources here succinctly suggest the enormous range of problems and issues facing delegates to COP10 — and the world. Overview * Current extinction rates are between 100 and 1,000 times higher than the "background rate" shown in the fossil record. ...
Don't know your MOP from your COP? You're not alone. United Nations conferences are awash with organizational and procedural monikers containing more letters than a Welsh train station sign. The following is a primer on COP10 acronyms; learn them all and you just might be ...
The cartoon character adorning ads and menus for the Kyoto restaurant Le Table de Thierry, it turns out, is a pretty good approximation of the owner himself: an upbeat, grande-size French-Togolese chef with a passion for demystifying French cuisine. Thierry Houngues, 51, was born in ...
Knowing Japanese troops had caused the deaths of her father's parents and siblings in World War II, Japan was about the last place Ha Thi Thanh Nga expected to end up. Today — some 30 years after arriving here as a refugee — Nga, ...
When Osaka-based entrepreneur Ray Kruger, 60, takes a break from a 70-hour work week to reminisce, his stories command attention. He explains about the haunted Buddhist temple he owns in the mountains near Kameoka, Kyoto Prefecture, a 440-year-old registered national treasure still used for ...
American author Paul Auster once called translators "the shadow heroes of literature," who have enabled us to understand that we all live in one world. He could also be describing Juliet Winters Carpenter, 61, one of the best-known literary translators from Japanese to English, ...
