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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.

COMMENTARY / Japan / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Nov 27, 2014

Censorship distortion of 'comfort women'

When Toho Studios wanted to turn 'The Life of an Alluring Woman' into a film, U.S. censors stepped in multiple times to demand script revisions.

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Nov 3, 2014

Redaction of a 'comfort woman' story

One of the Japanese stories sometimes mentioned in the 'comfort women' controversy was written by the late Taijiro Tamura in the spring of 1947. It depicted Korean 'comfort women,' but the U.S. Occupation 'suppressed' it.

COMMENTARY / World / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Sep 29, 2014

Condemnation attributed to 'utter nonsense'

Were 'comfort women' sex slaves for Japanese soldiers in World War II? If you recognize that prostitution is largely a form of physical bondage, they were. But forcibly rounding up women for the work would be a different matter. Recently the testimony of a man who claimed to have helped with the roundups was judged to be false, after causing Japan consternation for three decades.

COMMENTARY / World / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Sep 1, 2014

U.S. media coverage reveals a pro-Israel bias

Imagine Boston, including its coast, hemmed in by a relentlessly hostile superior power ready to attack it anytime from air, land and sea. Boston is about a third of the Gaza Strip in land area, but the same in population density.

COMMENTARY / World / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Jul 28, 2014

Anthropocentric bent of 'alien' fish

Japanese researchers of fauna and flora are becoming more like their U.S. counterparts inasmuch as they talk about the environment, ecology and biodiversity to disguise their anthropocentric expediency.

COMMENTARY / World / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Jun 30, 2014

A breed apart: liberal hawks who buoyed Bush

Those tough American liberal hawks who climbed aboard George W. Bush's war wagon into Iraq a decade ago were a breed apart.

COMMENTARY / Japan

May 26, 2014

U.S. life and times of a Japanese portrait artist

Today only a few art aficionados will recognize the name Kyohei Inukai, a New York society portrait artist who married or loved several American women during a period of rising racial prejudice against the Japanese.

COMMENTARY / World

Apr 28, 2014

Lest we forget LBJ's amazing side

Watching Robert Schenkkan's new Broadway play, 'All the Way,' is likely to remind people of how their views of U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson changed during the Vietnam War era.

COMMENTARY / World

Mar 31, 2014

A Korean who cherished her Japanese teachers

An 89-year-old Korean in Pennsylvania calls the latest spats between Japan and South Korea 'infantile and lamentable.' She remembers her Japanese teachers as loving people who 'poured their heart and soul into making good human beings out of us.'

Japan Times

CULTURE / Books

Mar 29, 2014

A wistful note on a triumphant battle

When I was a boy, my father told me and my kid brother stories from the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) and taught us how to sing some of the threnodies that Gen. Maresuke Nogi composed in classical Chinese on the battlefield. My father was born three years after the war, but memories of it were still...

COMMENTARY / Japan

Feb 24, 2014

Shinzo Abe isn't a nationalist in the traditionalist mold

Japan is still a country where its conservative leaders can't survive without showing glimpses of nationalism even as they advocate international cooperation. No way is Prime Minister Shinzo Abe nationalistic in the 'traditional' mold.

COMMENTARY / World

Jan 26, 2014

Mindless inventiveness for checkered legacies

To say that the late Ariel Sharon's eight-year-long coma had given Israel time to 'come to terms' with his checkered legacy is a cliche that deserves to be swept away.

COMMENTARY / Japan

Dec 30, 2013

Is being nice to customers really so disgusting?

That women in Japan are oppressed, neglected, or otherwise compelled to speak well above their natural pitch in formal settings has become a tired, cheap refrain among some American journalists.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Books

Dec 21, 2013

For the love of haiku

"Haiku," edited by haiku practitioner David Cobb, and "Haiku Love," edited by Japanese language scholar Alan Cummings, are both fun books. Originally published by the British Museum, they are sumptuously illustrated with nihonga (Japanese-style painting) and ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) from the museum's...

COMMENTARY / Japan

Nov 24, 2013

The immigration question

Despite Japan's low birthrate and rapidly graying population, only one in seven Japanese support the idea of increased immigration.

COMMENTARY / Japan / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Oct 28, 2013

It's risky business updating authorities on intelligence

Updating the authorities with knowledge of their Western enemies led to the death by disembowelment of one of the more farsighted Japanese intellects in 1841.

COMMENTARY / World / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Sep 29, 2013

Air festivals, the costs of flight and budget flak

The U.S. Air Force did not send its acrobatic team to the Misawa Air Festival this year because of budget cuts. Military flying machines can be exorbitantly expensive.

COMMENTARY / World / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Aug 25, 2013

Still dreaming of a level field after all these years

Wednesday will mark the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington that soon came to be equated with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech, "I Have a Dream."

COMMENTARY / Japan / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Jul 28, 2013

Where to go to survive the day? the corbies say

The word from a longtime Tokyo resident is that the jungle crow population, the bane of garbage piles, is finally in decline. Not everyone is happy about that.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Books

Jul 27, 2013

Multiple perspectives in novel on the Russo-Japanese War

I asked a Japanese friend how he would characterize Shiba Ryotaro's famous historical novel, "Clouds Above the Hill." I've known its immense popularity, but Shiba had started its newspaper serialization after I left Japan in 1968, and the size of the finished work — six volumes in book form —...

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By Tomoko Otake

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