Search - question

 
 
JAPAN
Jul 18, 2008

Life without parole finding support in Diet

With less than a year before Japan embarks on the lay judge system, some lawmakers are raising concerns that having to choose between the death sentence and the second most severe punishment — life with the possibility of parole after 10 years — will be too daunting a burden for the nonprofessionals...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 16, 2008

Are young people ready, willing to be adults at 18?

Kids just don't wanna grow up.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Jul 15, 2008

Human rights — strictly personal, strictly Japanese?

Go figure. Just a few weeks after I wrote about how Japanese courts try to avoid doing anything dramatic, on June 4 the Supreme Court ruled that a section of the Nationality Law was unconstitutional. Such rulings being so rare, I steeled myself for a big helping of highfalutin' Japanese legalese and...
Japan Times
Reference / SO WHAT THE HECK IS THAT
Jul 15, 2008

Tanuki genitals

Dear Alice,
JAPAN / G8 SUMMIT 2008
Jul 9, 2008

Staid events said losing relevancy

TOYAKO, Hokkaido — The three-day Toyako G8 summit will become history when it wraps up Wednesday. But with its conclusion, a growing number of critics are demanding that the whole concept of the summits becomes a thing of the past.
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jul 6, 2008

Fearless bluestockings in Japan

THE BLUESTOCKINGS OF JAPAN: New Woman Essays and Fiction From Seito, 1911-16, edited by Jan Bardsley. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2007; xii + 308 pp., $70 (cloth), $26 (paper) In 1911 a new publication appeared in Japan. It was singular in that it was written, edited...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 5, 2008

Obama can't escape America's realpolitik

During the Democratic Party primary season, all those eons ago, Barack Obama deployed no more powerful line against Hillary Clinton than his insistence that "we can't just tell people what they want to hear. We need to tell them what they need to hear." More than just a catchy couplet, the phrase was...
COMMENTARY
Jul 3, 2008

Iraq's petroleum dilemmas

An intense debate is going on inside Iraq about the future of its oil industry. That such a debate should be going on at all is encouraging and a sign that at last the security situation may be getting better and the government more established.
Japan Times
BASKETBALL / HOOP SCOOP
Jun 29, 2008

Japanese-American coach Walters aims to restore USF to glory

Let's take a trip down memory lane.
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jun 15, 2008

Nuggets of 'wisdom' can speak volumes beyond what's said

"Biting Comments, Curious Statements and Famous Misstatements" is the headline on the lead article in the June 5 issue of the popular Japanese weekly magazine Bungei Shunju. It features dramatic ejaculations of famous politicians, sports figures and entertainers, among others.
Japan Times
BUSINESS / UK JOURNALIST SYMPOSIUM
Jun 5, 2008

National pride comes before investment fall

Foreign investments have been a major part of the British economic revival over the past few decades, bringing new capital, ideas and talent to the nation, British journalists told the May 23 symposium.
Reader Mail
Jun 1, 2008

Qualified welcome after 10 years

Regarding the Views From the Street question posed on May 27, "Is it easy for foreigners to integrate into Japanese society?": I think the question should have been, "Are foreigners easily welcomed here?"
COMMENTARY
May 23, 2008

Asia's rise befalls the West

HONG KONG — "When many Western observers look at China," the former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani writes in his latest book, "The New Asian Hemisphere," "they cannot see beyond the lack of a democratic political system. They miss the massive democratization of the human spirit that is taking...
Reader Mail
May 22, 2008

Reincarnation may be the answer

Regarding Peter Singer's May 19 article, "If there is a god, then why is there suffering?": There aren't any easy answers to this age-old question. But outside the Christian faith, there are answers that are more acceptable to thinking minds than such dogmas as Original Sin and Eve's willful eating of...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
May 16, 2008

R&B queen Double adds jewel to crown

Staying at the top of the game after 10 years is no mean feat in Japan's fickle music business. As one of the first artists to bring American-style R&B to these shores, Double's achievements are doubly impressive. And now she's celebrating her first decade with an album of collaborations with Japanese...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
May 15, 2008

Butoh — Omnivorous and best not defined

In a small studio in Kichijoji, a director is telling three dancers that their heads are potatoes rolling around on a plate. And their three bald pates, poking up through a single piece of cardboard that holds them together, certainly have the appearance of earthy spuds, wobbling uncertainly across the...
COMMENTARY / World
May 14, 2008

The Jews' return to history

TEL AVIV — Ten years ago, on Israel's 50th anniversary, the peace process begun by the 1993 pathbreaking Oslo accord — reached by Israel and the Palestinian Authority — established the legitimacy of two peoples' existence in their shared homeland on the basis of territorial compromise. There was...
COMMENTARY
May 12, 2008

Clinton's surprise appeal on campaign trail

LOS ANGELES — How much suffering must a nation and its people go through before everyone says enough is enough?
Reader Mail
May 11, 2008

Winners in war remain hidden

The April 30 article about Raymond "Hap" Halloran, "War trauma leads to efforts to reconcile," brought tears to my eyes. Not so much the part about his being displayed as a war prisoner at Tokyo's Ueno Zoo in 1945, but the very end of the article, where Halloran declares that he has no answer as to what...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 8, 2008

An aura of controversy in the chase for the new

Ever since 1917, when Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal to the Society of Independent Artists' exhibition, arguing that it was art, anything has become acceptable. Artist Chris Burden shot himself in the arm in a Los Angeles gallery in 1971; Piero Manzoni canned what was allegedly his own feces and sold...
Reader Mail
May 4, 2008

Ultimate deterrent to repeat murder

In his May 1 letter, "Death penalty is no deterrent," Mark Callow claims that death penalty studies have "repeatedly found no evidence that capital punishment acts as a deterrent." I've been over and over this debate with my friends, family, coworkers, etc., and would simply ask Callow the following...
COMMENTARY
Apr 27, 2008

It doesn't take much imagination to guess the winner of an imaginary 'world primary'

LOS ANGELES — OK, so he did lose the Pennsylvania primary — but might Sen. Barack Obama be otherwise elected king of the world?
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 19, 2008

What shape is America's recession?

NEW YORK — Now that it is clear that the United States is in recession, the debate has moved on to whether it will be short and shallow or long and deep — a question that is as important for the rest of the world as it is for the U.S.
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 17, 2008

Have we finally achieved moral progress?

MELBOURNE — After a century that saw two world wars, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin's Gulag, the killing fields of Cambodia, and more recent atrocities in Rwanda and now Darfur, the belief that we are progressing morally has become difficult to defend. Yet there is more to the question than extreme cases...
Japan Times
Reference / SO WHAT THE HECK IS THAT
Apr 15, 2008

Kyodo bochi

Dear Alice,
EDITORIALS
Apr 7, 2008

The secrets of the sea

The investigative unit of the Ground Self-Defense Force has sent up a paper on an Air Self-Defense Force officer to the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office, accusing him of passing a "defense-related secret" to a Yomiuri Shimbun reporter in connection with a 2005 newspaper article. The unit acted...
COMMENTARY
Apr 2, 2008

U.K.'s ongoing EU headache

LONDON — What is a constitution? The question may seem to be a rarefied and abstruse one for lawyers and academics, but just at the moment it lies at the very heart of British politics and strategy.

Longform

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