The New York Times has a quartet of articles related to Japan.

One article deals with a lawsuit regarding WWII forced suicides. I have not heard much about this issue before and it is quite interesting. The topic of revisionist history is a universal one. In this particular case an author wrote about these suicides and was sued for defamation but the lawsuit was just thrown out.

A Japanese court has rejected a defamation lawsuit against Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel laureate in literature, agreeing with his depiction of deep involvement by the Japanese military in the mass suicides of civilians in Okinawa toward the end of World War II.

The defamation lawsuit, filed in 2005, was seized upon by right-wing scholars and politicians in Japan who want to delete references to the military’s coercion of civilians in the mass suicides from the country’s high school history textbooks. Last April, during the administration of Shinzo Abe, the prime minister at the time, the Ministry of Education announced that references to the military’s role would be deleted from textbooks.

Another article (actually Reuters run by the New York Times) discusses Japanese weightlifter Ryuta Takahashi who has was banned for two years after testing positive for an illegal steroid.

Takahashi becomes just the fourth athlete to receive a two-year ban from Japan Anti-Doping Agency (JADA) since the agency took on the role of a national disciplinary body in July 2007.

“We had cases in bodybuilding, chess and windsurfing,” Asakawa said.

You have to watch those chess players! Apparently, illegal doping is a much smaller problem in Japan than in the U.S. but it does exist in Japan, too.

Yet another article profiles the prolific Japanese architect Minoru Mori who has done a lot of work both in Japan and abroad.

As president of the Mori Building Company of Tokyo, he has remade the city’s skyline with half a dozen high-rises, including a $4 billion megacomplex over 27 acres, Roppongi Hills.

Now, he is fielding offers to build skyscrapers like the Shanghai center in Bangkok and Singapore. And he is planning to build or help build 10 more huge complexes like Roppongi Hills in downtown Tokyo, including one that could be Japan’s tallest, over the next 10 to 15 years.

The last article is a light look at Japanese cuisine by New York Times regular Japan correspondant Norimitsu Onishi (who also wrote the first article). The article is specifically about yoshoku, or “Western food.”

At once familiar and alien, these dishes may make Americans feel, with some justification, that they have wandered into a parallel culinary universe. All are standards of a style of Japanese cuisine known as yoshoku, or “Western food,” in which European or American dishes were imported and, in true Japanese fashion, shaped and reshaped to fit local tastes.

Today yoshoku is thoroughly Japanese. It is a staple of television cooking shows and mainstream magazines. The lines outside venerable upscale yoshoku restaurants here in Tokyo are as long as ever, mostly with older Japanese for whom yoshoku provided a first taste of a Western world they had not seen. Yoshoku restaurants are also a requisite of the trendiest new shopping districts, like Midtown and Roppongi Hills, where they cater to younger Japanese whose mothers made the food at home.

Happy reading!