Word: japanism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Princess Mononoke (1997) and Spirited Away (2001) were enormous hits at home: the first becoming the all-time box-office winner in Japan, until it was overtaken by Titanic; the second breaking that record and remaining the country's top grosser today. Those were also the first of Miyazaki's movies to receive a wide theatrical release in North America. So U.S. audiences know him from those films, and from the 2004 Howl's Moving Castle, whose characters (and their dwellings and vehicles) seemed to spring from the mind of Joel Hodgson's Gizmonics Institute. People who hadn't seen...
...towel with under a year in office (Shinzo Abe did the same last year) and the third to do so without holding a general election. Few prime ministers have been able to rise to the pop star status of Junichiro "the reformer" Koizumi, whose time in office saw Japan taking a more vocal role in global politics. But Fukuda was quitting for the sake of his organization, the Liberal Democratic Party - and he may have a strategy in mind...
...Upper and Lower Houses of the Diet have been paralyzed for more than a year now. In July 2007, the LDP lost the majority it held for five decades in the Upper House to the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the opposition party. Since then, Japanese politics has been rife with indecision. The government has been paralyzed by issues ranging from the appointment of a central bank governor to an antiterrorism refueling mission in the Indian Ocean. Tack on a scandal over millions of dollars in lost pensions, a resumption of the gas tax, higher health insurance premiums...
...critics, of course, who see no real change as the ultimate outcome of such political maneuverings. indeed, some fear that the lack of a strong Prime Ministerial candidate will only signal a return to the "revolving door" of national leaders that have made policy-making extremely difficult in Japan...
Cactus collectors are a surprisingly fervid bunch. A trawl of the enthusiasts' presence on the Internet - some of the plants' biggest fans are in Scandinavia, the Czech Republic and Japan - yields hundreds of sites offering information about cactuses as well as nurseries where collectors can buy. "There are more sites, more information than we have ever had," Wiedhopf says. "It's marvelous. That's the upside." The problem is that some collectors don't want to buy from nurseries. Rather than purchasing from, say, the acres and acres of cacti nurseries in the Netherlands, avid collectors travel to Mexico instead...