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EDITORIALS
Mar 17, 2003

Human rights abuses behind bars

Human rights violations in prisons are nothing new. But what happened last year at Nagoya Prison is alarming. Six prison guards, including a deputy warden, stand accused of physical abuses that resulted in the death of an inmate and caused severe injury to another. On the first day of their trial earlier...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 14, 2003

How the U.S. piqued Pyongyang

CAMBRIDGE, England -- If it weren't for the fact that the lives of several million people are at stake it could be fun watching the game of diplomatic poker being played by North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and U.S. President George W. Bush. Those lives are at stake, however, as is the future stability...
JAPAN
Mar 11, 2003

Pyongyang fires another missile

North Korea fired a ground-to-ship missile into the Sea of Japan on Monday -- the second such launch in two weeks -- in what appeared to be further provocation aimed at gaining Washington's attention.
EDITORIALS
Mar 8, 2003

Alarm bells ring in Iran

Conservatives claimed victory in local elections held throughout Iran last week. Hardliners are rejoicing over the results -- not only did they win the ballots, but the turnout also suggests that reformers have lost heart. Warnings of a backlash are not without foundation, but the hardliners' control...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Mar 7, 2003

Official handed suspended term

The Tokyo District Court handed a former Foreign Ministry official a suspended prison term Thursday for misusing funds and rigging bids for government aid projects for Russia.
JAPAN
Feb 26, 2003

Japan plays down North Korean missile provocation

The government tried Tuesday to play down the impact of North Korea firing a surface-to-ship missile into the Sea of Japan, saying launches of short-range missiles do not violate the Pyongyang Declaration.
JAPAN
Jan 31, 2003

Fueling U.S. planes that attack is legal: official

U.S. aircraft receiving fuel provided by the Self-Defense Forces and subsequently attacking Iraq would not constitute an act of collective defense, Osamu Akiyama, Cabinet legislation bureau director general, said Thursday.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jan 19, 2003

Facts are first casualty in U.S. march to war

WAR PLAN IRAQ: Ten Reasons Against War on Iraq, by Milan Rai. Verso, 2002, 240 pp., $15 (paper) When Richard Butler, head of the first U.N. weapons inspections team in Iraq, said in 1997 that "Truth in some cultures is kind of what you can get away with saying," he was referring to the regime of Iraqi...
SOCCER / J. League
Dec 23, 2002

Hamburg, Jubilo reach deal on striker Takahara transfer

OSAKA -- German first-division side SV Hamburg reached a deal with J. League champion Jubilo Iwata on Saturday for the transfer of Japan striker Naohiro Takahara.
EDITORIALS
Dec 3, 2002

Saudi Arabia's Faustian bargain

Ties between the United States and Saudi Arabia have come under increasing strain since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Suspicions about Saudi contributions to Islamic fundamentalist organizations and the kingdom's connections to international terrorism have raised questions about the durability...
EDITORIALS
Dec 2, 2002

Rigorous, fair inspections first

United Nations-led inspections of areas where Iraq is suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction have resumed after a hiatus of four years. On the first day, last Wednesday, an 11-member team from the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspections Commission, or UNMOVIC, as well as a six-member...
JAPAN
Nov 21, 2002

Former Pyongyang agent speaks to DPJ

A former North Korean agent on Wednesday urged the government to help Japanese-born ethnic Koreans and their Japanese spouses who have defected from North Korea to this country, saying they are living under severe conditions without jobs or Japanese nationality.
EDITORIALS
Nov 20, 2002

War must not be seen as inevitable

U.N. weapons inspectors are back in Iraq after a four-year hiatus. An advance team of about 30, accompanied by Mr. Hans Blix, head of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, and Mr. Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, arrived in Baghdad on Monday...
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 18, 2002

Only bitter solutions remain in Chechnya

LIMASSOL, Cyprus -- Europeans have a way of knowing what's best for other peoples' conflicts but facing their own crises with ineptitude, and there is no better demonstration of this than their attitude to the war in Chechnya.
JAPAN
Nov 17, 2002

Public split on abductee family story

The magazine Shukan Kin'yobi (Weekly Friday) said Saturday it has received numerous complaints about its interview in Pyongyang with the family of Hitomi Soga, one of five Japanese abducted 24 years ago by North Korea who returned to Japan for the first time on Oct. 15.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Nov 17, 2002

Skeletons in the academic closet

"Those who have put out the people's eyes reproach them of their blindness'' -- John Milton (1608-74)
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Nov 15, 2002

Putting Japan's first bilingual WP to the test

In my previous installment, I noted that Toshiba launched the first dedicated Japanese-language word processor in 1979. Five years later, the Japan subsidiary of MicroPro International Corporation, publisher of WordStar, the pioneering English word processing software, was preparing to launch "WordStar...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Nov 12, 2002

Suzuki enters plea of not guilty in court

House of Representatives member Muneo Suzuki pleaded not guilty Monday to bribery, perjury and falsifying political funds reports.
JAPAN
Nov 6, 2002

Pyongyang warns it may test missiles if Japan talks fail

BEIJING -- Pyongyang may lift its moratorium on missile tests if normalization talks with Japan drag on without any progress, the North Korean Foreign Ministry warned Tuesday.
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 3, 2002

Russian youth dodge conscript military

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- It took a while to get the young deserter to talk. Roman had fled his army unit and was staying with Tatiana Barykina and her family, and they could see the scars on his wrist and sense the pain that hung upon him like a millstone.
COMMENTARY
Oct 28, 2002

Reformists persist in Iran

Late last month I made my first visit in 22 years to Iran, where I had covered the Islamic revolution under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini as a Japanese newspaper correspondent. Some conspicuous changes in the country attracted my attention.
COMMUNITY / How-tos / LIFELINES
Oct 25, 2002

For the right and the wrong kind of break in Japan

Tourist redress Sheila from London, wants to sound off about a ryokan (traditional inn) she stayed at in Kyoto in early October.
COMMENTARY
Oct 21, 2002

Confessions from North Korea

SEOUL/PUSAN -- They say that a little bit of confession is good for the soul, but North Korea's sudden burst of religion is creating a moral dilemma for Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul. First, Pyongyang decides to come clean on the kidnapping of Japanese citizens, admitting to Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi...
COMMUNITY
Oct 13, 2002

Saved by . . . 'a bad feeling'

Paul Malone turned down the adventure of a lifetime -- but his decision probably saved his life. The 30-year-old Australian is alive and well in Tokyo. Instead, he could so easily have been named in recent news reports as missing in the South Pacific along with former NBA basketball star Bison Dele and...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Oct 6, 2002

Building bridges by degree

Life was tough for Yanan Shen at his undergraduate alma mater, located between Shanghai and Nanking in China's Chang Zhou area.
EDITORIALS
Sep 28, 2002

Pyongyang must tell the full story

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's meeting Friday with the families of those abducted by North Korean agents made it unmistakably clear that the understanding and support of those relatives -- and of the Japanese public in general -- is essential to progress in the normalization talks that are expected...
BUSINESS
Sep 24, 2002

EU energy chief details plan to keep oil reserves

OSAKA -- The ideal price for oil is just over $20 a barrel, or $8 less than the current price, the European Union's commissioner of energy and transport said Monday, indicating an EU plan to stockpile oil is in response to unforeseen emergencies.
COMMENTARY
Sep 24, 2002

Building corporate integrity

A spate of corporate scandals have rocked Japan this year. Snow Brand Foods Co. and Nippon Ham Co. mislabeled beef, abusing the government's buyback program that was set up to bail out the beef industry following the outbreak of mad cow disease in Japan. Trading giant Mitsui & Co. was implicated in a...

Longform

Construction takes place on the Takanawa Gateway Convention Center in Tokyo, slated to open in 2025.
A boom for business tourism in Japan?