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November 27, 2024

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COMMENTARY / World

Feb 21, 2003

Stand shoulder to shoulder with U.S.

The following is an unofficial translation of an appeal made Thursday by 39 members of the Japan Forum on International Relations. Related news story

COMMENTARY / World

Feb 20, 2003

Brinkmanship in spades 40 years later

By Richard Halloran

HONOLULU -- As the United States hurtles toward the brink of war with Iraq and North Korea, the confrontation bears a striking resemblance to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Therein lie lessons that might well be read in Washington, Baghdad and Pyongyang.

COMMENTARY

Feb 20, 2003

Farcical economic flip-flops

By Gregory Clark

Japan's economic debate has moved from the bizarre to the ridiculous. Just two years ago we were told that fiscal restraint was the key to economic recovery. Annual bond issues to finance government spending would not be allowed to exceed 30 trillion yen ($250 billion). In other words, cutting demand...

COMMENTARY

Feb 19, 2003

Missile defense is an offense

By Glyn Ford

BRUSSELS -- It is difficult to understand the Bush administration's determination to deploy a national missile defense system, or NMD. All test launches to date -- to prevent theoretical nuclear missile attacks -- have been either failures or "partial successes."

COMMENTARY / World

Feb 19, 2003

It's no longer just the economy, stupid

By Michael O'Hanlon and Aaron Moburg-Jones

WASHINGTON -- In recent weeks, as often in the past, many key Democrats have contributed importantly to American national-security debates. They have been trying to increase funding for homeland security efforts, prodding President George W. Bush to remain multilateral in his approach to Iraq even as...

COMMENTARY

Feb 18, 2003

Japan must shift to regional autonomy

By Kenzo Uchida

Elections are in Japan's forecast for this year -- nationwide local elections in April, the contest for the Liberal Democratic Party presidency in October and perhaps a general election for the House of Representative sometime in between -- with a strong possibility of political turbulence along the...

COMMENTARY / World

Feb 17, 2003

U.S. forces should go home

By David Wall

CAMBRIDGE, England -- In the recent presidential election in South Korea, candidate Roh Moo Hyun played to the populist tune when he called for U.S. troops to leave the country. This was a response to the highly emotional popular reaction to the deaths of two South Korean girls who were accidentally...

COMMENTARY

Feb 17, 2003

Poverty fuels Afghanistan's drug trade

By Farhan Bokhari

ISLAMABAD -- The recent crackdown on opium producers by Afghan officials, resulting in the arrest of more than 100 poppy farmers in eastern Afghanistan, promises only to intensify global concerns about the central Asian country becoming the world's largest source of raw material for heroin.

COMMENTARY

Feb 17, 2003

Korean stability matters most to China

By Frank Ching

HONG KONG -- "China should step up and defuse the situation," an American official in Washington said to me in December, referring to the North Korean nuclear issue. "That's what a great power would do -- exert its influence and defuse the problem."

COMMENTARY

Feb 17, 2003

Fears of 'anti-Americanism' overblown

By Ronald Meinardus

MANILA -- In 1996 Samuel Huntington published his epochal work "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order." In it, he argues that, since the demise of the Cold War, cultural divides have become the focal points of international conflicts. Judging from recent editorials in American and...

COMMENTARY / World

Feb 16, 2003

Profits perpetuate horrors of child labor

By Gautaman Bhaskaran

MADRAS, India -- There is Dickensian distress in India, where child labor persists despite a law and a court order. Fifteen million children below 14 continue to work in the most horrific of conditions in blatant violation of the Indian Supreme Court ruling, which had called for the enforcement of the...

COMMENTARY / World

Feb 16, 2003

Democracy in Myanmar going nowhere

By Nyunt Shwe

Myanmar has no formal greeting words. A surprise? But we have variations that are more practical to our lives, depending on the time and circumstances. If you meet someone along the way, the most common words are: Where do you come from? Where are you going? Or, how are your father's, mother's or your...

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

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Totopa in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward was picked by consultants TTNE as the best sauna of the year.

Japan’s sauna movement: Relax, refresh, repeat

By Greg Dvorak

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Azabudai Hills, Tokyo’s green new downtown ‘village’

Azabudai Hills, Tokyo’s green new downtown ‘village’

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