Shopping Centers Japan

Two leading Southern California real estate developers and a group of major Japanese firms are expected to announce plans today to build four giant retail and entertainment malls in Japan worth more than $3 billion. The plans call for American-style retail and entertainment complexes--featuring such well-known entities as Wolfgang Puck restaurants and the upscale Sports Club fitness facilities--tailored to a Japanese audience. The projected completion date is late 1999.

HISAYAMA, Japan Rice farmer Yoshimi Abe, 74, stands beside a shopping cart here at the grand opening of Japan's largest mall and thinks about his ancestors. In place of the staple Japanese grain the land produced for centuries, his 3.5 acres recently sprouted a Costco discount store. "My father and grandfather farmed these fields. The saddest part is that this land will never again be turned back to rice," Abe said, looking slightly uncomfortable in a suit. "But we didn't really have any choice.

HISAYAMA, Japan Rice farmer Yoshimi Abe, 74, stands beside a shopping cart here at the grand opening of Japan's largest mall and thinks about his ancestors. In place of the staple Japanese grain the land produced for centuries, his 3.5 acres recently sprouted a Costco discount store. "My father and grandfather farmed these fields. The saddest part is that this land will never again be turned back to rice," Abe said, looking slightly uncomfortable in a suit. "But we didn't really have any choice.

Two leading Southern California real estate developers and a group of major Japanese firms are expected to announce plans today to build four giant retail and entertainment malls in Japan worth more than $3 billion. The plans call for American-style retail and entertainment complexes--featuring such well-known entities as Wolfgang Puck restaurants and the upscale Sports Club fitness facilities--tailored to a Japanese audience. The projected completion date is late 1999.

Akira Yoshizawa, an innovative practitioner of origami who was widely considered the master of the art form, has died. He was 94. Yoshizawa died of heart failure complicated by pneumonia, on March 14, his birthday. He had been hospitalized near his home in Ogikubo, Japan, outside Tokyo, according to June Sakamoto, a board member of Origami USA in New York.