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COMMENTARY / World
Aug 2, 2014

U.S. think tanks turning into message merchants

Most U.S. think tanks were once idea factories, but now many are message merchants.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 1, 2014

A little self-control can add up to big savings

An American economics columnist reports that having to spend cash out of an envelope rather than just pulling out the debit card has made her much more frugal.
Japan Times
WORLD / Politics
Aug 1, 2014

An Iraq in peril struggles to hold together

Salman Khaled has already lived through Baghdad's sectarian disintegration; with Iraq now splintering into Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish regions, he says this time the survival of the country is at stake.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 31, 2014

Indonesia gets a sprout with a new president

Having conducted an election that produced a successor president without excessive tumult or corruption, Indonesia may well be on its way to emerging as a major global player.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / NATURE'S PANTRY
Jul 29, 2014

Meet the artisan family striving for a better fish flake

The local train bound for Yamakawa bucked and buckled down the coast, jouncing us until our teeth rattled, and Yamakawa was so dinky we had to walk across the train tracks to exit the station. The taxi took us through a confusing rabbit warren of streets and, after asking directions several times, we...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 29, 2014

Why I'll be flying again on Malaysia Airlines

Despite losing its second airliner in four months, Malaysia Airlines says its generous refund policy for 2014 has not resulted in a surge in requests for refunds. There is good reason for that.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 27, 2014

The pathetic state of infrastructure in America

The deliberate starving of public funding for America's roads, bridges, parks, schools, public hospitals, even hospitals charged with caring for U.S. veterans, reflects the economic and political system's ass-backward priorities.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Jul 27, 2014

What economic policies will fit the 'growth strategy'?

The Abe government has decided on its new economic growth strategy — the 'third arrow' of 'Abenomics' — but what of today's production systems, which are quite different from the models depicted in economics textbooks?
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jul 26, 2014

Japan's 'Moe' obsession: the purest form of love, or creepy fetishization of young girls?

Anyone who has visited Tokyo's Akihabara district in the past decade will have run into countless images of cartoonish girls: in posters, in figurines and in the form of real women dressed up as French maids.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jul 26, 2014

Cypulchre

Many writers have tried in vain to emulate the cool tech-lingo-driven prose of author William Gibson's early cyberpunk fiction, and it's easy to pick those budding science-fiction writers who cast themselves as his successor — fellow Canadian Joseph MacKinnon falls into this category.
Japan Times
CULTURE / CULTURE SMASH
Jul 25, 2014

Anime enjoys summer homes in Los Angeles

For more than two decades, post-production, audio and creative studio Bang Zoom! Entertainment in Burbank, California, has been delivering the anime fix abroad. Founder and CEO Eric P. Sherman talks about how it all began.
BUSINESS
Jul 25, 2014

GSK corruption allegations spread to Syria

GlaxoSmithKline faces new allegations of corruption, this time in Syria, where the drugmaker and its distributor have been accused of paying bribes to secure business, according to a whistleblower's email reviewed by Reuters.
Japan Times
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Jul 24, 2014

Sakaiminato — the city of fish and festivities

Sakaiminato in Tottori Prefecture is a city that is ideal for tourists. It's one of the biggest fishing towns in Japan, and as the hometown of Mizuki Shigeru, author of the yōkai (Japanese folklore monsters and ghouls) manga series "GeGeGe no Kitaro," it's known as the birthplace of some of the country's...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 24, 2014

Putin nears a tipping point

By overplaying its hand in Afghanistan and lying to the world about the downing of a Korean Air Lines flight 31 years ago, the Soviet regime exposed and accelerated the rot that made its collapse inevitable. There is no reason to believe in a different fate for Vladimir Putin's effort to re-establish Russia as an imperial power.
WORLD
Jul 24, 2014

Dogs are capable of feeling jealousy, U.S. study says

Dogs are a man's best friend, and research released on Wednesday says canines want to keep it that way.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 23, 2014

Airline deaths won't end conflict in Ukraine

Thanks to a perverse kind of geographical bias, the downing of MH17 won't put an end to the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 22, 2014

Success of Chinese reform is key to BRICS' rise

Last week, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) took a decisive step toward building institutions that could plausibly challenge the long geopolitical and economic ascendancy of the West. But Vladimir Putin's posturing at the meeting just hours before a Malaysia Airlines jetliner was shot down in Ukraine was one indication of the group's inability to offer an acceptable moral and political alternative to Western hegemony.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / VIEWS FROM THE STREET
Jul 21, 2014

Atami: What do you make of this statue of a jilted gent kicking a girl while she's down?

Gracing the shoreline in Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture, is a statue unique among the many in Japan that celebrate local legends or famous historical figures: A work depicting a man kicking a woman.
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Jul 21, 2014

Stuck in the middle with chū — one kanji's central role

In the 1981 novel "Red Dragon" — the first Thomas Harris thriller featuring archvillain Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter — the Sino-Japanese ideograph 中 (read naka or chū, and meaning center or middle) makes an appearance. It is composed of a rectangle with a line going through its center. Graphically...
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Jul 19, 2014

Lost Tokyo ... rediscovered

People who have lived in the capital for more than a few years generally claim to know Tokyo pretty well. We discover a forgotten side to the city that suggests they may not know it quite as well as they think.
CULTURE / Books
Jul 19, 2014

Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential

"Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential" was first published in 2010, offering readers a rare insight into a growing global fascination with the image of the Japanese schoolgirl. This revised edition features eight new sections that focus on developments on the subject, including an analysis of the fall and...
WORLD / Science & Health
Jul 17, 2014

Mutant worms may hold key to drugs blocking the effects of alcohol

Mutant worms may show a way to prevent people from becoming intoxicated from alcohol, a study released on Wednesday said.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / BLACK EYE
Jul 16, 2014

Unpacking koto: retain, discard and repeat as necessary

Unpacking koto — the intangible baggage — in Japan has proven to be the challenge of a lifetime, replete with enough drama and trauma to keep me knee deep in 'think pieces' till I keel over.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / JAPANESE KITCHEN
Jul 15, 2014

Japanese summer garnishes invigorate the taste buds

In Japanese cooking, garnish is not just added to a dish to make it look pretty. The word to describe the herbs and vegetables that accompany a dish is yakumi, which means "medicinal flavor," and originally referred to the concoctions that practitioners of Chinese medicine made using various ingredients...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 15, 2014

Can't win by ravaging Gaza

Israel's targeting of Hamas is an attempt to distract from the slowly building collective sentiment among Palestinians throughout Palestine and among Palestinian citizens in Israel.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 15, 2014

U.S. policy triggered latest border crisis

The U.S. does everything it can to screw up the Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, then acts surprised when desperate people from there, including thousands of children, show up at the U.S. border, trying to escape the carnage.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 15, 2014

Kremlin's expensive trip down memory lane

Moscow is preparing to spend billions of dollars to restart construction on the storied and ill-starred Baikal-Amur Mainline railroad. Sadly Vladimir Putin's nostalgia will come at great cost to the country's pension system.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 11, 2014

If only the U.S. had stayed out of WWI

Did U.S. intervention in the latter stage of World War I end up in just prolonging the European slaughter? David A. Stockman, first-term budget director for President Ronald Reagan, says it did as well as trigger a cascade of offenses later on in the 20th century.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 11, 2014

The silver fox of dictatorship and democracy

The reality of the times was that Eduard Shevardnadze was both a democrat and a despot. His death brings closer to the end the Gorbachev generation of reform communists who presented a stark contrast to the dour Brezhnev-era hard-liners, spurring (mostly inadvertently) the collapse of the Soviet empire and the long transition to democracy.

Longform

A man offers prayers at Hebikubo Shrine in Tokyo's Shinagawa Ward. The shrine is one of several across the country dedicated to the snake.
Shed your skin and reinvent yourself in the Year of the Snake