Featured Articles
Haruki World
If you're troubled by cats that talk, skies that rain sardines, sheep that hijack people's brains, girls that vanish into other universes and superfrogs that save Tokyo, then Haruki Murakami may not be for you. But prepare to find yourself in a shrinking minority.
Even the critics, once huffily disdainful, are rethinking their earlier hostility. They may be baffled by the enthusiasm Murakami's fiction arouses among readers worldwide — in an age, moreover, when popular passions have lately tended to pass literature by — but they cannot help acknowledging it, or admitting, however grudgingly, that a writer with Murakami's impact must have a finger on the secret pulses of the time. What are those pulses? What does Murakami's fiction tell us about ourselves?
Working with Japan
Managing Those Sidebar Discussions
By Patricia Pringle
What Are They Talking About?
Joe Smith and his team are in a meeting with Manabu Okumura and two members of his team who are visiting from the head office in Japan. They are in the middle of two days of face-to-face meetings to get through a long list of test items in preparation for regulatory testing. They are all talking in English, but just when the discussion gets going on a particularly critical point, Okumura's team goes into a huddle and starts speaking together in Japanese. This happens quite a lot, and goes for five or even 10 minutes at a time. Joe begins to get annoyed. What are they talking about? Don't they see how rude it is to interrupt the meeting and waste everyone's time? What are they talking about, anyway?
Products Of The Month
Origami Audio
For an amazingly affordable price, you can build your own external speaker “cabinet” for use with your home personal computer or other audio source. Tokyo-based Princeton Technology has tied up with New Transducers Ltd. of the UK to offer its PSP-NXT series. The basic unit is a high-performance monaural speaker with built-in power supply that draws it power via a USB connector to a personal computer.
Contents
2009 December Contents
Contents of the month
Ranking
LIFEWhat is indispensable to lead a happy life? Source: PRABE (Conducted among people of all ages)
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