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November 21, 2024
 

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Jeff Kingston
Jeff Kingston lives in Tokyo, teaches history at Temple University Japan and has been contributing to The Japan Times since 1988. "Contemporary Japan" (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) is his most recent book.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Oct 24, 2015
Assessing Japan's rightward shift at the top
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is Japan's most ideological postwar prime minister, pushing right-wing policies on numerous fronts that trample on postwar norms and values. He has been able to do so because he has the Diet in his back pocket, but how did this tectonic shift in Japanese politics happen?
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Oct 17, 2015
Japan's public diplomacy of churlish cluelessness
Enough is enough. How dare UNESCO inscribe primary sources and a wartime video about the Nanking mayhem into global memory? I fully support the Japanese government's threats to withdraw funding from UNESCO to protest its recent decision to include a dossier submitted by China, "Documents of Nanjing Massacre,"...
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Oct 10, 2015
Getting back to Japan's old-fashioned erotic values
The good news is that for two years in succession Tokyo has staged shunga (erotic woodblock print) exhibitions — one at Toyo Bunko in 2014 and the ongoing show at Eisei Bunko — and there doesn't appear to have been a marked surge in moral decadence or signs of civilization crumbling.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Oct 3, 2015
Universities fending off attacks on the liberal arts
As discussed last week, in June the education ministry sent a directive to all 86 national universities in Japan, apparently calling on them to abolish or reorganize their humanities and social sciences departments.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Sep 26, 2015
Abe government targets the liberal arts
Over the past several weeks I have received many emails from all over the world asking me if reports about government plans to pull the plug on humanities and social sciences departments at Japanese national universities are accurate or just a bad joke. At this point it's not clear exactly what the government...
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Sep 19, 2015
Rearranging the deck chairs on the nuclear Titanic
The International Atomic Energy Agency's recently released postmortem on the Fukushima nuclear accident of 2011 makes for grim reading and serves as a timely reminder of why the restart of the Sendai nuclear plant in Kyushu is a bad idea.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Sep 12, 2015
Student protesters want a revitalized democracy
The large and loud crowds that regularly gather outside the Diet on Friday evenings are the result of student activists trying to do something constructive to block Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's security legislation.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Sep 5, 2015
Students oppose Abe's assault on the Constitution
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe continues to say he will try to gain the public's understanding on the government's controversial security legislation, but there are few signs that he is winning anyone over.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Aug 29, 2015
Trump's 'yellow peril' jibes break with GOP script
In his recent Rolling Stone essay, Matt Taibbi immortalizes the race for the Republican Party presidential nomination, as a freaky spectacle that is "like watching 17 platypuses try to mount the queen of England. You can't tear your eyes away from it."
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Aug 22, 2015
Abe's revisionism and Japan's divided war memories
The Abe statement, approved by the Cabinet on Aug. 14, has elevated a myopic and exonerating revisionist narrative of history to Japan's official policy.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Aug 15, 2015
Abe statement was vague in all the wrong places
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made a hash of his long-anticipated statement on Friday commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Aug 8, 2015
Abe's security laws nothing like same-sex marriage
In every intensely fought political battle there are moments of incongruous absurdity, but in the current tumult facing embattled Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, it doesn't get more ludicrous or desperate than the parallel drawn between the U.S. Supreme Court's decision affirming same-sex marriage and the...
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Aug 1, 2015
Atomic bomb survivors nominated for Nobel prize
In this 70th year anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Swiss-based International Peace Bureau (IPB) nominated Hidankyo (Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations) for the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize. This is Hidankyo's third such nomination by the IPB, following...
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jul 25, 2015
Rightists distort author Park Yu-ha's views on 'comfort women'
Park Yu-ha, an academic at Sejong University in Seoul, is the darling of the Japanese right because of her alleged stance on the "comfort women" system. But their cherry-picking of her writings distorts her views and twists them into support for the revisionists' vindicating and exonerating narrative....
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jul 18, 2015
Abe's historic opportunity to reset regional relations
On Aug. 15, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will give a much-anticipated speech commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. This presents a golden opportunity to hit the reset button on regional relations and to generate momentum toward overcoming history driven tensions that plague East...
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jul 11, 2015
The politics and pitfalls of war memory and apology
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's handling of history issues during this 70th anniversary of Japan's World War II defeat came under critical scrutiny at the recent Japanese Studies Association of Australia conference hosted by La Trobe University in Melbourne.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jul 4, 2015
Exhuming Indonesia's horror in search for justice
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Gestapu, the murky events in Indonesia that precipitated a massacre of several hundred thousand people in 1965-66 that constitutes one of the most murderous convulsions of the 20th century.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jun 27, 2015
Sri Lanka's memory wars thwart reconciliation
Six years after the end of the civil war that claimed at least 70,000 lives between 1983 and 2009, Sri Lanka appears to have made little progress on reconciliation between its ethnic Tamils and Sinhalese majority.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jun 20, 2015
In search of Japanese and American shared values
There is a good deal of blather about the shared values that are ostensibly the foundation of the alliance between Japan and the United States. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and President Barack Obama invoked this mantra when they met in Washington to finalize new Japan-U.S. defense guidelines that hardly...
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jun 13, 2015
Pipe dreams of a 'grand bargain' in East Asia
As the 50th anniversary of the normalization of ties between Japan and South Korea approaches, it seems there is little to celebrate.
Ishiba delays meeting with Trump, citing legal restrictions
Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba waves upon arrival for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, in Callao, Peru, on Friday.
Two of America’s biggest debt holders are dumping Treasurys
The U.S. Treasury building in Washington. Investors in Japan and China sold a pile of U.S. debt in the last quarter, just before the U.S. presidential election.
Rising sex tourism exposes loopholes in Japan's anti-prostitution law
While financial misfortunes during the COVID-19 pandemic may have driven some women to work the streets, others simply want more money to spend — or want to pay off their debts — at host clubs.
Japan ranks last in romance satisfaction for second straight year
In a survey of 31 countries, Japan ranked last in terms of those who felt loved, with just 51% of respondents saying so.
Ruling coalition and DPP strike last-minute deal over economic policy
DPP policy chief Makoto Mahaguchi speaks at the party's policy gathering in Tokyo on Wednesday.
Japan, U.K. and Italy discuss inviting more countries to joint fighter project
A new concept model of a next-generation fighter jet to be jointly developed by Japan, Britain and Italy is on display in Farnborough, Hampshire, in July.
Haruki Murakami's 'The City and Its Uncertain Walls' gives deep deja vu
For “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” translated into English by Philip Gabriel, Haruki Murakami confronts the ghosts who won't leave him alone.
Japanese expats in Asia find community through rugby
The Taiwan Fivewoods celebrate their victory at the 2023 Asian Japanese Rugby Cup in December of last year.
In Fukushima, a weekend of prose, poetry and translation
Aomori-based writer JJ Carter presented on tabletop gaming as creative inspiration for building characters and narratives.
For Dr. Nakamats, aging is just experience in action
Though he didn't win the recent gubernatorial election in Tokyo, the 96-year-old Dr. Nakamats' run was seen as inspirational in Japan's aging society.

Podcast

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.
Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Longform

Construction takes place on the Takanawa Gateway Convention Center in Tokyo, slated to open in 2025.
A boom for business tourism in Japan?
By Kathryn Wortley

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