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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 / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

May 30, 2010

Does democracy still count if it's conditional?

NEW YORK — With Barack Obama's military policy in the Middle East getting murkier by the day, his predecessor George W. Bush's stated goal of democratizing the region through violence has to be judged to have failed. The thought prompts the reflection that forced democratization could entail considerable...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Apr 25, 2010

Results of carnal prohibition are no surprise

When the Vatican "scandal" erupted, I happened to be reading Kumagusu Minakata's writings on homosexuality — to be exact, his writings as selected, with comments, by Taruho Inagaki. I was doing so because Inagaki (1900-1977) won Japan's literary "grand prize" for his book, "The Aesthetic of the...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Apr 4, 2010

70 times safer than the roads themselves

NEW YORK — The Toyota saga, though quiet for the moment, will continue. "Lawyers Vie for Lead Roles in Toyota Lawsuits," said a headline in The Wall Street Journal (March 15). The company's "legal bill for unintended-acceleration cases will be in the billions," predicted Jeremy Anwyl of Edmunds.com,...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Feb 28, 2010

Three LatAm capitals and the Tokyo of 1964

NEW YORK — While visiting three capitals in Latin America on a lecture tour earlier this month, I wondered if Tokyo looked or felt like any of these cities to someone visiting it from New York or a large European city half a century ago.

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Jan 31, 2010

Dysfunctional hairs of a vaunted democracy

NEW YORK — Three recent developments in a span of two days reminded me how dysfunctional and uncivil America's vaunted democracy has become.

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Dec 27, 2009

Usual conformist cliches about the Japanese

NEW YORK — So Roger Cohen, a relatively new columnist with The New York Times, concluded after a brief stay in Tokyo earlier this month that Japan is a society laid low by "a tremendous conformity" and trivialized by "otaku" ("Japanese Obsessions," Dec. 14).

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Nov 29, 2009

The warring mind-sets on U.S. immigration

NEW YORK — Over dinner with a consultant friend recently, our conversation drifted to U.S. immigration when she said, "I'm worried about our future."

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Oct 24, 2009

Standing army still the prize peace-breaker

NEW YORK — The news that President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize immediately brought to mind comparisons with former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who received the same prize back in 1973. In the outpourings of sharply divided reactions that ensued, a great many, it...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Sep 27, 2009

Hatoyama just calling it as it is

NEW YORK — I was startled to receive a letter from a friend in Tokyo earlier this month accompanied by a Sankei Shimbun article by Yukio Okamoto sharply upbraiding Yukio Hatoyama.

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Aug 30, 2009

Media connivance in walking the dogs of war

NEW YORK — For five days following Japan's surrender this month in 1945, the Mainichi Shimbun, by then reduced to a single sheet because of severe paper shortages, published editions with a good deal of blank space: on Aug. 16, Page 2 totally blank; on the 17th, not just Page 2 but also a third...

CULTURE / Books

Aug 9, 2009

Contention over the tenno system

This collection of 14 essays by 12 scholars, ranging from academic, journalistic, speculative, to advisory, makes an excellent introduction to the scope of arguments presently made about tenno, Japan's "emperors."

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Jul 26, 2009

Blunderbuss followup to the invasion of Iraq

NEW YORK — The New York Times editorial on June 30, "The First Deadline," showed America's egocentrism at its worst. Dealing entirely with a single subject — the withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraqi cities, with 130,000 soldiers still remaining in the country — the lengthy...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Jun 28, 2009

Mythmaking and the Kamikaze 'volunteers'

NEW YORK — Lisa Hosokawa Garber, a fresh graduate of St. Andrews Presbyterian College in North Carolina, has sent me "Crosswind," her short, imaginative account of three months in the life of a youth training to be a Kamikaze pilot. It describes what its author calls a Shakespearean "twist of fate":...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

May 31, 2009

Japan's wartime sentiment toward China

NEW YORK — What were the Japanese saying when their country plunged into a war in 1937 that would last eight years and end in utter defeat?

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Apr 26, 2009

Recalling 'the fall of the Yasuda Auditorium' and the end of Japan's student movement

At a friend's Easter Sunday dinner party, I asked, "What do you think the student movement of the '60s in the U.S. accomplished?" One guest answered, "Obama's election." Unexpected but true: in this country, the opposition to the Vietnam war went hand in hand with the movement that culminated, in federal...

CULTURE / Books

Apr 5, 2009

Looking at history: the argument for facts over theory

Positivism in historiography means an emphasis on facts over theory, documentary evidence over deductions from premises. It may also be called "nitty-gritticism," George Akita suggests in "Evaluating Evidence," a book that recounts the author's dealing with primary sources and the problems he has come...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Mar 29, 2009

Hold the SOS call on the Japanese language

Will the Japanese language die, crushed by the onslaught of English? This question has set off some heated talk in Japan recently because of a book suggesting that it may. First, a friend of mine in Tokyo, a member of a small reading club, told me about it. Then another friend wrote to say the book became...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Mar 1, 2009

What 'prohibition' has wrought

NEW YORK — When I read the news that the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy "blasted the U.S.-led drug war as a failure that is pushing Latin American societies to the breaking point" (Wall Street Journal, Feb. 12), I thought: Someone is finally talking sense. I have long regarded...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Jan 25, 2009

Repercussions of war gone bad

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Dec 29, 2008

Suppressing more than free speech

I recently read a book that, a decade ago, created a controversy in Japan about homosexuality. In it the prize-winning writer Jiro Fukushima described his sexual relationship with Yukio Mishima dating from 1951.

You can often see generations of families enjoying performances together at Fuji Rock Festival.

Japan’s summer music festivals are feeling the heat in more ways than one

Akiko Trush says her experience with the neurological disorder dystonia left her feeling like she wanted to chop her own hand off.

The neurological disorder that 'kills culture'

By Tomoko Otake

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