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December 26, 2024

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EDITORIALS

Feb 21, 1999

Architecture for a new millennium

A new building was opened in Berlin last month that has set the architectural world buzzing. If architecture is "frozen music," wrote one observer, citing Friedrich von Schelling's famous dictum, then Berlin's new Jewish Museum is "a truly dissonant piece."

COMMENTARY

Feb 21, 1999

Medicare plan cuts care more than costs

By Doug Bandow

WASHINGTON -- Pension programs in the United States as well as many other countries are heading over the fiscal cliff. Even President Bill Clinton has noticed the problems with Social Security.

EDITORIALS

Feb 20, 1999

Haunting the high street

As the Internet insinuates itself deeper into daily life, one key facet of its future role -- electronic commerce -- continues its explosive growth. Estimates of the amount of business conducted in cyberspace vary from $30 billion annually to nearly twice that. But one thing is certain: It is increasing...

COMMENTARY

Feb 20, 1999

As Tokyo goes, so goes Japan

By Kenzo Uchida

Utter chaos reigns in the runup to the Tokyo gubernatorial election, the most important of all local elections to be held in April. The outcome of the preliminary battle is likely to have a great influence on national politics.

COMMENTARY / World

Feb 20, 1999

Globalization, the world's whipping boy

By Brad Glosserman

For one brief moment less than a decade ago, the idea of "globalization" was viewed with more promise than peril. At the time, it represented an emerging economic reality: the merging of national markets into a single entity that traders and merchants anywhere could access at anytime. This "24-hour,...

EDITORIALS

Feb 19, 1999

The Japan-U.S. performance gap

The U.S. economy has extended its sparkling performance into a ninth year, albeit attended by sentiments of rising caution on Wall Street. The contrast with Japan's decline in the 1990s is so strong that events in the United States look as though they are happening on another planet. In a global era,...

EDITORIALS

Feb 18, 1999

Europe discovers its Kurdish problem

Europe has worked hard to put considerable distance between itself and the Kurds. There have been condemnations of Turkey's violent, repressive policies toward its Kurdish minority, but sensitivities about Ankara's strategic role in European defense and concerns about the reaction of the 1 million Kurds...

EDITORIALS

Feb 17, 1999

The true meaning of the dioxin scare

Nose, a small town on the northern outskirts of Osaka, first put the fear of dioxin into nation's consciousness last year. Now, just 10 months later, another dioxin scare has hit the headlines. This time, the site is Tokorozawa, the Saitama bedroom community on the northwestern outskirts of Tokyo. The...

EDITORIALS

Feb 16, 1999

Post-impeachment Clinton

Officially, the impeachment ordeal of U.S. President Bill Clinton is over. Last Friday, the Senate -- in two bipartisan votes -- rejected both charges against the president. By a vote of 55 to 45, they threw out the first article of impeachment that alleged Mr. Clinton committed perjury when testifying...

EDITORIALS

Feb 13, 1999

The victims have rights, too

With all the attention now being focused by the government, police and judicial authorities, educators and the media on Japan's rapidly increasing juvenile crime rate and the escalating level of violence frequently involved, the rights of the victims of crimes in this country have often seemed of secondary...

EDITORIALS

Feb 11, 1999

Hope for East Timor

East Timor has never fit comfortably within the sprawling archipelago that is Indonesia. The province was a Portuguese territory from the 17th century until 1975, when a socialist government in Lisbon abandoned the country's colonial pretensions. That triggered a struggle for control of the region. The...

EDITORIALS

Feb 10, 1999

Encouraging signs in South Asia

The world was shaken last May when India and then Pakistan conducted underground nuclear tests. Citizens of the two countries danced in the streets as the two governments declared themselves members of the nuclear club. Reaction elsewhere was just as heartfelt, but for entirely different reasons. The...

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

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Visitors to Kyoto walk along a street near Kiyomizu Temple in April. A popular tourist spot, Kyoto has seen what locals feel to be an overwhelming amount of tourists in 2024.

Is Japan ready for 60 million tourists?

By Kathryn Wortley

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Site designer on why expos matter more than ever

Site designer on why expos matter more than ever

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