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COMMENTARY / World
Apr 8, 2014

Russia's big bet on 'Putinomics'

Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks he can enjoy political and military freedom in dealing with Ukraine without experiencing crippling economic costs from sanctions or the exit of multinational firms from Russia.
LIFE / Digital
Nov 26, 2013

What's Twitter's real value?

A national economy is an unimaginably complex system. And yet we compress all its complexity into a single measure, and then focus obsessively on that. If you want a metaphor for this, think of King Kong spending most of his time staring at a pinhead, worrying about whether it is moving or not. That...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Oct 26, 2013

Pink Globalization

Pink Globalization, by Christine R. Yano, Duke University Press
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 21, 2013

Deflating the hype on big data

Big data holds the promise of harnessing huge amounts of information to help us better understand the world. But the hype is causing contrarians to fall into hyberbole.
Japan Times
WORLD
Jul 28, 2013

Breakneck NSA growth fueled by insatiable demand for its product

Twelve years later, the cranes and earthmovers around the National Security Agency are still at work, tearing up pavement and uprooting trees to make room for a larger workforce and more powerful computers. Already bigger than the Pentagon in square meters, the NSA's footprint will grow by an additional...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 28, 2013

'Stanley Ka Dabba (Japanese Title: Stanley no Obentobako)'

The politics of the bento (lunch box) are embedded in the Japanese DNA and most of us have an ingrained sense of the power play brewing inside one's lunch. Which is why "Stanley Ka Dabba" (international title: "Stanley's Tiffin Box") will strike a chord."Stanley Ka Dabba" hails from Bollywood, but it's...
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Jun 2, 2013

Language no barrier to multimedia Jon Kabira

With a long rousing cry of “Goooooooood Mooooorning Tooookyoooooooooooo!” Jon Kabira launches into his weekly radio show “JK Radio — Tokyo United” every Friday at 6 a.m. on J-Wave.
MORE SPORTS
May 30, 2013

Swimmers Hagino, Yamaguchi draw positives from below-par performances

Even in a post-Olympic year, the spotlight is still there on the swimming pool.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Apr 24, 2013

A strong Japan can help the United States in Asia

China's continuing dispatch of ships and aircraft to the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands previews the future Japan faces if Beijing keeps rising and Tokyo keeps falling.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Apr 10, 2013

A Japanese poet's whale elegy

If some Japanese advocates of whale hunting could commune with their ancestors, they'd feel the past dismay at the impious waste of whales' lives.
Japan Times
BUSINESS / Tech
Mar 30, 2013

Summly highlights how smartphones are upending media models

Many this week celebrated the latest tech wunderkind, a British teenager who made a fortune selling an app that boils down news reports, no matter how important or complex, into a pithy 400 characters. But for some of those who prefer heartier servings of news, the development carried at least a whiff...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 22, 2013

Arbitrage

Richard Gere was offered the role of Gordon Gekko in "Wall Street" and turned it down, a decision he "always regretted" as he said at a Tokyo press conference some years ago. Now he's landed a role to vindicate that regret, in slow-burning thriller "Arbitrage," which stars Gere as Wall Street hedge-fund...
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital
Feb 20, 2013

Digital capitalism produces few winners

Need a crash course in digital capitalism? Easy: you just need to understand four concepts — margins, volume, inequality and employment.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 5, 2013

To regain its vitality, U.S. must lose its paranoia

A Marine officer cannot square the pettiness in the discourse of U.S. elders with the nobility of the men and women he served with in Afghanistan.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Nov 2, 2012

Madonna finds kindred spirit in Wallis Simpson

"At dinners and parties," Madonna recalls, "I found that whenever I brought up the topic of Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, it was like throwing a Molotov cocktail into the conversation." Of course, the same story could be told about the speaker herself.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 1, 2012

The abandoned economist

Milton Friedman, the combative, impish free-market economist, died in 2006, too early to witness and diagnose the financial crisis of 2008 and the long economic slump we've experienced since. But that doesn't mean he's absent from the debate over how to handle it.
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / JAPAN TIMES BLOGROLL
Jul 22, 2012

Shisaku

Shisaku is a homophone meaning essay, a meditation upon a subject, a policy or measures a government takes. A fitting title for analyst Michael Cucek's blog which provides insight and opinion on Japanese politics, with a distinct hint of satire. In the eight years he's been writing the blog, Shisaku...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 12, 2012

Public theater takes on a leading role

Once upon a time, Japanese contemporary theater shared the limelight with youth-cultural movements that were rocking the nation. Back then, in the late 1960s and '70s, the avant-garde works of the angura (underground) theater scene had such an affinity with the radical student movement that they often...
Japan Times
Features / WEEK 3
Apr 15, 2012

U.S. forces keep the world in their sights

Complex issues often become much easier to understand when they are approached with the benefit of a broader perspective.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Apr 5, 2012

Lee Bul: Inspired by the past imperfect

She may be Asia's leading female artist, but Lee Bul has grown very tired of that title.
CULTURE / Art
Apr 5, 2012

Lee Bul: Inspired by the past imperfect

She may be Asia's leading female artist, but Lee Bul has grown very tired of that title.
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
Dec 18, 2011

Hip-hop star gives designer a leg-up to fame

As a child growing up in mountainous Yamanashi Prefecture in the 1970s, artist Shojono Tomo had an irrational fear of using the brakes on her bicycle — though none whatsoever about riding just as fast as she could.
EDITORIALS
Sep 5, 2011

Working holiday anniversary

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the working holiday system in Japan. The program has enabled 20,000 young Japanese a year to live and work abroad, gaining valuable experience and broadening their point of view, but that number should be more. The re-energized attitudes and global outlooks that...
Japan Times
LIFE
Aug 28, 2011

The best of his years . . .

This summer, my translator and I stood in Izumi Matsumoto's home-cum-office in Tokyo, where he had just been searching in vain for any original drawings from "Spring Wonder," which was, 27 years ago, the first manga serial he pitched to leading comics magazine Weekly Shonen Jump.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Mar 10, 2011

Zen psychology: Daisetz Suzuki remembered

Despite the gloomy global economy, the field of positive psychology is booming. Often described simplistically by journalists as "the science of happiness," it's actually a broad focus on our strengths and talents, virtues and peak experiences in daily living. The name for this specialty originated with...
BUSINESS
Nov 19, 2010

Toyota plans green-car blitz

Toyota is planning to sell a plug-in hybrid car in the U.S., Japan and Europe in 2012, targeting sales of 50,000 vehicles a year at ¥3 million each without subsidies as it strengthens its green lineup to keep pace with growing competition.
BUSINESS
Nov 6, 2010

Toyota's profit quadruples to ¥98.7 billion

Toyota's second quarter profit more than quadrupled on a sales recovery despite lingering worries about the quality of its cars, especially in the key U.S. market, after massive recalls.
BUSINESS
Nov 5, 2010

North America sales growth key: Honda

Honda Motor Co., Japan's second-largest carmaker, said sales growth in North America and emerging markets will help offset the impact of the strong yen.
BUSINESS
Oct 30, 2010

Sales surge doubles Honda's profit

Honda's second-quarter profit more than doubled, brushing off damage from a strengthening yen as car and motorcycle sales grew in the U.S. and Japan.
EDITORIALS
Dec 15, 2009

Realistic view on war and peace

In the October announcement of its decision to bestow the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on U.S. President Barack Obama, the Norwegian Nobel Committee attached special importance to his "vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons." The committee also praised the U.S. president by stating: "Only very...

Longform

Visitors walk past Sou Fujimoto's Grand Ring, which has been recognized as the largest wooden structure in the world.
Can a World Expo still matter? Japan is about to find out.