Word: schoolyard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...scattered over Hunan by Japanese warplanes were perhaps the world's most pampered vermin, raised by the imperial army's Epidemic Prevention and Water-Supply Unit, better known as Unit 731. Today the ruins of its headquarters, located outside the Manchurian city of Harbin, stand next to a village schoolyard. Chatter from the nearby basketball court wafts past an unpainted wooden shed with a shabby metal roof that covers 96 cement pits, each a meter square. Here, 60 years ago, Japanese doctors infected yellow rats with the plague and dropped them into flea-filled oil drums. Workers then loaded...
...Builder, the construction worker who generates 35% of the company's sales. Lawes and his wife are expecting their first child in the fall--at about the same time Barney gets a makeover (insiders say he will be in a park instead of the same old schoolyard). "I can see it now," says Lawes. "I'll be the most popular dad in the nursery school. I'll take my child and all his or her friends to meet Barney, live. How cool is that...
After Japan's bubble economy burst, youth crime surged, brutal schoolyard beatings became frequent and teenage prostitution evolved into a regular part of urban life. A "lost generation" started venting their malaise by randomly attacking salarymen, assaulting the homeless and even killing their parents. Japan is still a rich country that pampers its young, but the nation and its children seem increasingly aimless...
...Everybody else in this comfortably wealthy country seems lost. Things that matter?family, safety, community, aesthetics, money?appear to be slipping away, and the sense of alienation and desperation deepens with every headline decrying the nation's unemployment rate or senseless schoolyard violence. The collective yearning for someone?anyone?to check the country's spiritual drift is palpable. "People are seeking mental healing during this time of continuous bad news," says Nobutaka Inoue, a professor of religious studies at Tokyo's Kokugakuin University...
From the same marketing masterminds who catapulted Pokemon into every U.S. schoolyard comes Japan's latest export: Yu-Gi-Oh!, featuring Yugi, a nerdy kid who uses magical powers to morph into a spiky-haired, hubcap-eyed hero with a grownup bod. Yugi is an ace cardplayer who battles (using cards, of all things) with electric lizards, man-eating bugs and all manner of mystical creatures in a complex, secret world that youngsters (mostly boys ages 9 and up) can't get enough of and--lucky for the kids--most parents can't be bothered to understand...