More Opinion Articles - The Japan Times

November 28, 2024

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COMMENTARY

Dec 11, 2002

Pakistan's nuclear promises

By Farhan Bokhari

ISLAMABAD -- Pakistan's new prime minister, Zafarullah Khan Jamali, has begun his tenure with renewed promises that the country's nuclear weapons will remain in safe hands.

COMMENTARY / World

Dec 11, 2002

Relax, Australia's not invading anyone

By Alan Goodall

SYDNEY -- To hear some Southeast Asian leaders sound off lately, a casual observer might suspect Australia is about to invade Indonesia or Malaysia or even the Philippines. Such is the folly of listening to "news" as whipped up by audience-boosting television channels fed by headline-grabbing politicians....

EDITORIALS

Dec 11, 2002

Moving in the right direction

Never in recent memory has a government advisory group engaged in such a bruising battle of words and ideas. Last week, following a stormy debate that caused its chairman to resign, a commission on privatizing debt-ridden highway corporations adopted a final report calling for a drastic cut in toll-road...

EDITORIALS

Dec 10, 2002

The larger, the better?

Japan has about 3,200 cities, towns and villages. The government and the Liberal Democratic Party, among others, think that is too many. They believe that small districts should be consolidated to improve administrative efficiency so that they can better meet the diverse needs of residents.

COMMENTARY

Dec 10, 2002

Political stability decreasing

By Kenzo Uchida

Nearly 20 months since the administration of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi began, popular support for the Cabinet hovers around 50 to 60 percent, down from the extraordinarily high levels of 70 to 80 percent last year.

COMMENTARY / World

Dec 8, 2002

Pre-emption is as old as war

By Richard Halloran

HONOLULU -- Suppose, for the sake of argument, the Japanese flotilla bearing down on Hawaii from the north Pacific 61 years ago this weekend had been discovered before its carriers launched their dive bombers and torpedo planes to attack the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor. What should the Americans have...

COMMENTARY

Dec 8, 2002

Jiang put in a position to kill the party

By Frank Ching

HONG KONG -- Chinese President Jiang Zemin, far from stepping down as a result of giving up his post as the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, appears to have bolstered his position vis-a-vis his successor as party leader, Hu Jintao.

COMMENTARY / World

Dec 8, 2002

Fellow Tibetans threatening Dalai Lama

By Gautaman Bhaskaran

MADRAS, India -- Buddha taught peace to mankind, but his followers in India appear to have embarked on a path of violence. In the northern Indian town of Dharamshala, the headquarters of the Tibetan government in exile, posters now threaten to kill the Dalai Lama.

COMMENTARY / World

Dec 8, 2002

Myanmar's generals allergic to dialogue

By Nyunt Shwe

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and many world leaders have welcomed the recent release of 115 political prisoners from various prisons in Myanmar. At the same time, many leaders have voiced concerns about the more than 1,000 remaining political prisoners, human rights abuses and the lack...

EDITORIALS

Dec 8, 2002

'I 've never seen a purple cow/I never hope to see one/But I can tell you anyhow/I'd rather see than be one," wrote the American humorist Gelett Burgess more than 100 years ago. Burgess is a man whose views we ought to pay more attention to. After all, he also supposedly invented the "blurb," by writing...

EDITORIALS

Dec 7, 2002

Controversial Aegis dispatch

Whether or not to send an Aegis destroyer to the Indian Ocean has been a touchy question ever since Japan indirectly joined in the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan about a year ago. The question was settled, officially at least, earlier this week when the government decided, after hemming and hawing,...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM MOSCOW

Dec 7, 2002

NATO's Balkanization begins

By Constantine Pleshakov

MOSCOW -- The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established after World War II to protect Western Europe from a possible Soviet invasion. Once the Soviet empire crumbled, it was left without a purpose. In the euphoria of 1989-1991, it seemed that democracy and humanism had triumphed throughout Europe,...

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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