Word: japanism
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...Japan, he's known as Beno, especially to the hip set who flock to the crowded, invitation-only nightclub parties he's been co-organizing for the past 15 months. "I had projects in France but times were difficult," he explains. In Tokyo, by contrast, he finds things easier. The Isetan department store has begun stocking his clothing brand, Boëge, named after his home town in the Alps. He keeps an eye on French politics, but has few illusions. "There's so much inertia," he says. "It's a wonderful country, but the energy to succeed needs...
...blowers in jazz and a venerated sideman for greats like Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington, he was one of the rare masters of bebop--a jaunty sound previously deemed incompatible with the clarinet's soft tones. The arranger and composer also branched out to embrace sounds from countries like Japan and Senegal, helping launch the genre now known as world music. In doing so, he skirted classification--and high-voltage celebrity. "Without experimenters," he said, "jazz would die a lingering death...
...Japan's past keeps evolving, especially when it comes to World War II. Historians have long believed that the Japanese army forced civilians to commit suicide at the end of the battle of Okinawa, which was about to fall to the U.S. That's the story Japanese student textbooks told too, until the government announced on March 30 that it had ordered publishers to delete those passages. Instead one textbook now reads that Okinawans were "driven to mass suicide," without mentioning the army's role. The change is the latest controversial tweak by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who also recently...
...Japan is a trainspotter's paradise. From the 12 separate metro lines that twist beneath Tokyo like a bowl of noodles to the suburban commuter trains packed to bursting every morning and evening, the country runs on rails. In 2005, Japanese traveled 243 billion miles by railroad - nearly 1,900 miles per person. And 49 billion of those miles were covered by the shinkansen, the super-fast bullet trains that make intercity travel as simple as a subway hop. If all you've ever known is the slow torture of Amtrak, you won't believe trains that reach...
...over a decade, Japan has been experimenting with electromagnetic trains at a testing facility in Yamanashi prefecture, about 50 miles west of Tokyo. The repulsion created between magnets embedded in the U-shaped track and others embedded inside the cars causes the train to levitate 10 cm above the bottom of the track - "maglev" is short for magnetic levitation. The magnets also propel the train forward very, very quickly, in part because air creates less friction than rail. The Yamanashi test maglev set a world speed record for trains in 2003 at 361 mph, and it cruises...