Word: salarymen
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Showtime's Weeds (Mondays, 10 p.m. E.T.) focuses on the supply side. Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) is a housewife in fictional, upscale Agrestic, Calif., whose husband dies, leaving her with two sons and too little insurance money. So she starts dealing marijuana to bored salarymen. Soon Nancy discovers a whole illicit world of suburban toking: a young dealer gripes to her that his inventory was tapped out by stoners watching the bird documentary Winged Migration at the multiplex. Far from hardening her, her tiptoe into the grass has Nancy "beginning to think I am extremely naive...
...This increasingly distinct divide between rich and poor is so vivid in the national consciousness that it has been given a name: kakusa shakai (a society of disparity). It isn't hard to find statistical evidence of the phenomenon. In a land once noted for its armies of workaholic salarymen, part-time employees now account for 30% of the labor force. In February, the government announced that the number of people on welfare rose 60% over the last 10 years, reaching 1 million citizens for the first time since the program started in 1950. And according to recent findings...
...Aptly dressed in casual clothes, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi hopes to save the second largest importer of oil 81 million gal. each summer. But the policy already has many conscripted conservationists sweating in their seats. "Like samurais giving up topknots and swords, it requires a change in mentality for salarymen to abandon suits and ties--it's their identity," says Environment Minister Yuriko Koike. An unexpected bonus: the campaign may generate as much as $942 million in fashion sales. --By Coco Masters/New York. With reporting by Yuki Oda/Tokyo
...COVERED First-time novelist Susan Barker's book on salarymen and geisha in Osaka, Tsunami Nights, was all the rage at Frankfurt's book show in 2003; post-disaster, publisher Doubleday picked a new moniker: Sayonara...
...said to him and even less about his actions, forges a relationship with a similarly confused young woman (Scarlett Johansson). Midway through the movie, Harris finds himself half-drunk in a private Tokyo karaoke room singing Roxy Music's More Than This to a group of passed-out Japanese salarymen less than half his age. Murray, the creator of Nick the SNL lounge cretin, never veers from character and never winks at the audience for sympathy. Instead, he turns the song into an awkward, agonizing moment of realization and regret. "That performance," says Hoffman, "is just unbelievable...