Hiroaki Sato - The Japan Times

November 22, 2024

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Hiroaki Sato

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Hiroaki Sato

A Japan Times columnist since 2000, Hiroaki Sato has won prizes for his translation of poetry (PEN American Center, Japan-US Friendship Commission). A paperback edition of his "Legends of the Samurai" has recently appeared. He is now working on a second collection of samurai tales with their origins.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Mar 28, 2004

Zen and the art of Beatnik haiku

JACK KEROUAC: Book of Haikus, edited and with an Introduction by Regina Weinreich. Penguin USA, 2003, 240 pp., $13.00 (paper). Jack Kerouac (1922-69), the King of the Beats, started writing haiku with the belief that this short poetic form was an avatar of Zen, and he pursued both haiku and Zen to his...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Feb 23, 2004

Critical war questions beg for an answer

NEW YORK -- First, my historian friend George Akita sent me a clipping of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's article that appeared in The Honolulu Advertiser (Aug. 7, 2003). Titled "We need rules for waging war," the piece begins with McNamara remembering the night of March 9, 1945, when...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Jan 26, 2004

Foreseeing the future -- and ignoring it

NEW YORK -- U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy has recently reminded us why the U.S. forces decided not to go all the way to Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War. Addressing the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 14, he pointed out that it was none other than the first President Bush and...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Dec 29, 2003

Cutting an ancient myth down to size

NEW YORK -- The myth of the Japanese sword, which Quentin Tarantino plays to the hilt in the film "Kill Bill," has several origins: There was a religious connection. The manufacture of the blade was linked to Shugendo, a form of nature-worship that held that rough physical training is essential to enlightenment....

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Nov 24, 2003

High price of media-fabricated heroism

NEW YORK -- Good for her. U.S. Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch, finally given a chance on TV to have her say, punctured the notion of heroism concocted by the Hollywood publicist placed in Baghdad and the American mass media, ever the willing partner of their government when it comes to war.

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Oct 27, 2003

War perspective of poets oceans apart

NEW YORK -- A gentleman named Paul Preusser, describing himself as "a composer and fresh graduate from the New England Conservatory," has recently written to ask if I could help him with poems of Kotaro Takamura (1883-1956). He has been commissioned to compose "a song cycle using poetry which is influenced...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Sep 29, 2003

Debate on Emperor's role in war lives on

NEW YORK -- Will the nearly 60-year-old debate on the Showa Emperor's role in World War II ever end?

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Aug 25, 2003

Humanity takes a bite out of Mother Earth

SUNSET BEACH, North Carolina -- Sunset Beach is a summer resort town that appears to have achieved its full-blown status only about a dozen years or so ago, just about the time we started spending our two-week vacation in the beach house of our poet friend Grace Gibson. Photos taken when she built the...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Jul 28, 2003

Commodore Perry's legacy of curiosity

NEW YORK -- In the sesquicentennial of U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry's visit to Japan, I am happy to imagine that I must be one of the few owners of the original edition of his report: "Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, Performed in the Years 1852, 1853,...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Jun 30, 2003

U.S. policy only fuels fundamentalism

NEW YORK -- "In pre-surrender discussions of the postwar world, no principle, save the basic principle of democracy itself, was more frequently cited than that of religious freedom as essential to the establishment of a permanently peaceful world."

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

May 26, 2003

Casualties soar in America's war on words

NEW YORK -- During war, news manipulation comes to the fore; so does language manipulation. In the latest war against Iraq, as in the Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon sold a "Star Wars" depiction of U.S. technological prowess, blithely hiding the carnage it created. And many American news organizations...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Apr 28, 2003

America is the greatest abuser of WMD

NEW YORK -- One duplicitous aspect of the United States' war on Iraq has been the use of the term "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD). No, I am not talking about the kinds of weapons that are assumed in the question raised by the conservative Chicago Sun-Times columnist Robert Novak on April 7 -- "Where...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Mar 31, 2003

Modesty marked this great man of letters

NEW YORK -- Herbert Passin, whom I had the honor of knowing, died on Feb. 26. Like kabuki expert Faubion Bowers, whom I also knew, Passin was a top graduate of the Military Intelligence Service Language School, which was established in 1941 in preparation for the coming war with Japan. Both did wonderful...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Feb 24, 2003

When is a war crime not a war crime?

NEW YORK -- Gunning down civilians on the ground in war may constitute a war crime, but blasting civilians out of existence from high in the sky does not. Or so the general rule seems to be.

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Jan 27, 2003

Corporations cast a shadow on education

NEW YORK -- Did you know that Stanford University has a Yahoo! Chair of Information Management Systems?

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Dec 30, 2002

Pomp, ceremony and the U.S. presidency

NEW YORK -- A new book by Christopher Anderson is called "George and Laura: Portrait of an American Marriage." Andersen, who also wrote "Jack and Jackie" and "Bill and Hillary," may not always be "respectful," to quote a reviewer, toward America's First Couples, but the appearance of his latest book...

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Dec 22, 2002

Kazuko Shiraishi does it her way

KAZUKO SHIRAISHI: Let Those Who Appear. Translated by Samuel Grolmes and Yumiko Tsumura. New Directions, 2002, 49 pp., $12.95 (paper). I've met the poet Kazuko Shiraishi three times, on each of her visits to New York. Shiraishi made her latest trip to this city in the spring of 2002, to mark the publication...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Nov 25, 2002

Gilded Age of excess returns to America

NEW YORK -- During a recent talk in this city on his lifelong subject, the Iwakura Embassy, businessman-scholar Saburo Izumi reminded those gathered that the Japanese group visited the United States during the Gilded Age. This appellation comes, of course, from American writer Mark Twain (and C.D. Warner)...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Oct 28, 2002

Words of wisdom on U.S. interventionism

NEW YORK -- Searching the Internet for information on immigration in the United States, I came across President Grover Cleveland's message to Congress on Dec. 18, 1893. In it he detailed his opposition to the annexation of Hawaii. At the start of that year, a self-styled Committee of Safety, led by foreign...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Oct 13, 2002

Beijing stymies Pyongyang experiment

HONG KONG -- Pyongyang-Beijing ties used to be characterized as being "as close as lips and teeth," but that phrase no longer applies to the relationship. For no sooner does North Korea arouse deep Japanese public outrage with its prevarication over past abductions than the isolated Stalinist state provokes...

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

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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SWCC keeps changing with keyword ‘new challenges’

SWCC keeps changing with keyword ‘new challenges’

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