Word: osaka
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...experience as a gallery buff. "We are our best users," he says. "We don't pretend to know anything about art. We just enjoy going to shows." Baron extends his beat to the Kansai region later this year, with an edition of the site dedicated to art happenings in Osaka, Kobe and other major centers...
DISMISSED. A LAWSUIT demanding damages by 188 plaintiffs offended by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's three visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors soldiers killed in past wars, among them 14 Class-A war criminals; by the Osaka High Court; in Osaka. Although the court rejected the demands for nominal payments of $90 per plaintiff from Koizumi, the Japanese government and the shrine, its judgment also said that the prime minister's visits?which routinely roil relations with China and South Korea by rekindling resentment of Japanese wartime atrocities?violate a constitutional requirement calling for the separation of church...
...Cafe Osaka, unemployment is made to seem almost agreeable. The experimental job-placement office, partially owned and operated by the Osaka city government, is staffed by women in brightly colored uniforms who greet their downcast clients with a bracing, robotically cheerful "Konnichiwa!" Job seekers, most of them dressed in dark blue "recruit suits," help themselves to free coffee, juice or oolong tea while perusing binders of employment listings and speaking to job counselors or company recruiters. The song Don't Worry, Be Happy endlessly loops over the sound system...
...Opportunities in Japan's second largest metropolis are scarce; Osaka prefecture's unemployment rate of 6.4% was the third highest in the nation last year. Even if he could find work, Ijiri says he feels unprepared to join the winner-takes-all rat race of postindustrial Japan. He longs for his father's era, the heyday of Japan Inc., when young adults were whisked directly from college into a womblike corporate career, where they would be sheltered by a paternalistic business culture for life. "People like me who aren't particularly talented at anything are happier with the old system...
...issues like Japan's rapidly aging (and soon to be declining) population and China's challenge to Japan for Asian hegemony, and there's plenty of cause for national concern. Roppongi Hills may be ready for the future, but Ijiri and the kids hanging out in the Job Cafe Osaka are not. Sociology professor Yamada says the real problem crippling Japan is not the wealth gap between rich and poor but the "hope disparity"?a widening gulf between those who see a brighter future ahead and those who do not. In Osaka, Ijiri can relate. His father's generation...