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COMMENTARY / World
Jul 3, 2013

Egypt liberals make more noise, wield less power

The winds should have been favorable for new President Mohamed Morsi after the 'last pharaoh' was deposed a year ago. Instead, Egypt is socially divided.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 3, 2013

U.S. power defined by 'rise of the rest'

The question of American power in the 21st century is not one of a poorly specified 'decline' or of being eclipsed by China but, rather, the 'rise of the rest.
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Jul 1, 2013

Voting for idols is bigger than politics

Elsewhere in the world, the kind of sōsenkyo (総選挙, general election) that fires up public interest and garners media attention is one where political parties compete for national office. In Japan, however, the sōsenkyo of aidoru gurūpu (アイドルグループ, idol group) AKB48 tends to grab...
WORLD / Science & Health
Jul 1, 2013

Study tracks couples' emotional interplay in conflicts

Picture this scenario: You are on a road trip with your partner, trying to find your hotel, lost in an unfamiliar area and driving in circles.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 1, 2013

Beef all you want, Helicopter Ben was dropping hints since May

Shoulda, woulda, coulda. It's been a week since Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke "surprised" financial markets by telling them exactly what they expected, yet the whining is still going strong.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / BACKSTREET STORIES
Jun 30, 2013

Blazing a woodland trail through Shin Kiba

Even if you can't read the kanji for Shin Kiba, you'll sniff out its meaning of "new wood place" the moment you arrive. The Yurakucho subway line's terminus there in eastern Tokyo smells like a cedar closet. Inside the station, a display of Japanese carpentry — including beams featuring dovetail, mitered...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jun 30, 2013

Preaching Endo's theme of a maternal divinity

Endo Shusaku has helped Japanese Christians to assimilate their painful past and has weaned them away from narrow concerns with dogma or sexual guilt to project instead a broad and humane vision of the faith, sensitively attuned to the Japanese context.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jun 30, 2013

Complete translation of 'Kafu's first masterpiece'

The English reader has in this volume a complete translation of works of fiction, interspersed with thinly disguised autobiography and essay-like passages, composed by a young Japanese man who was to go on to become one of the finest Japanese writers of the 20th century, Nagai Kafu (1879-1959).
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 30, 2013

A defeat for DOMA, and the end of the 'ick' factor

Future generations will shake their heads at how fearful Americans sounded today debating same-sex marriage. At least most of the Supreme Court justices get it.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Jun 30, 2013

Charting U.S. decline, without anger

One of the odd things about American news programs is how little American news they feature. Typhoons and hurricanes, crazies and lone gunmen, Barack Obama staging a press conference, 10 seconds about the Middle East, a famous actor doing something scandalous, back to the weather: All this giddy fragmentation...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jun 30, 2013

Smartphones are killing the art of conversation

If our age is rich in anything, it is, one would think (wrongly), rich in things to talk about. How can anyone nowadays be at a loss for words? What excuse is there for awkward silence? The merest glance at a newspaper furnishes conversational fodder for a lifetime — reminding us, if anyone is in danger...
Japan Times
WORLD / Society
Jun 29, 2013

Global protest grows as citizens lose faith in politics

The demonstrations in Brazil began after a small rise in bus fares triggered mass protests. Within days this had become a nationwide movement whose concerns had spread far beyond fares: more than a million people were on the streets shouting about everything from corruption to the cost of living to the...
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink / JAPANESE KITCHEN
Jun 28, 2013

Watch your summer food pairings

I'll never forget that day during the summer when I was 14. I'd been away in the Yatsugatake Mountains of Honshu with my schoolmates for a rinkan gakkō (a multi-day school trip to the countryside), and on the way back we'd stopped for lunch at a large roadside diner. On the menu was tempura, followed...
Japan Times
ASIA PACIFIC
Jun 27, 2013

Snowden's stay in H.K. filled with intrigue

The message was blunt and was delivered Friday night by a shadowy emissary who didn't identify himself but knew enough to locate Edward Snowden's secret caretaker: The 30-year-old American accused of leaking some of his country's most sensitive secrets should leave Hong Kong, the messenger said, and...
COMMENTARY / Japan
Jun 27, 2013

Abe's fixations threaten newfound unified approach on North Korea

Just as U.S. President Barack Obama seeks a united front to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe threatens to go rogue.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 27, 2013

Five myths about the National Security Agency

One common denominator of NSA whistleblowers is that they feel ignored when attempting to bring illegal or unethical operations to the attention of higher-ups.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 27, 2013

Saudi Arabia backsliding on women's rights

The trumped-up case in which two leading Saudi activists for women's rights were sentenced to prison is a symptom of the kingdom's regression on human rights.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 26, 2013

Turkey's turn to fight over future

The protests in Turkey now involve an extraordinary diverse group. They are said to pit secularists against Islamists and authoritarians against democrats.
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health / FOCUS
Jun 26, 2013

Drumming helps those with dementia reconnect

Standing in a room full of lined faces, Alan Yellowitz held up an orange drum shaped like a wineglass. "This one's called a djembe," he said. "It's from Ghana."
BASKETBALL / NBA / NBA REPORT
Jun 26, 2013

Move by Rivers once unimaginable

Duck, duck your head! Pigs are flying!
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 26, 2013

James Gandolfini and the art of 'The Sopranos'

James Gandolfini's legacy will remain a cascade of popular television programs that people who search for quality aren't embarrassed about to watch and debate.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE FOREIGN ELEMENT
Jun 25, 2013

Authors take polar-opposite tacks as they try to decipher Japanese women

It's an all-too-familiar story: On the romantic front, foreign ladies living in Japan have it bad while the guys do unbelievably well. For every woman who complains about Japanese men's aloofness and lack of communication skills, there is a man who boasts about all the local chicks he's had.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / VIEWS FROM THE STREET
Jun 25, 2013

Tokyo: Do you think conscription — in Japan or elsewhere — is a good thing or a bad idea?

I think conscription is a bad idea because we always say people are equal and can do what they want, and I myself am all for liberty and freedom of choice. To that end, people, whoever they are, must be able to do what they want, and if they don't want to [join the military], that is quite alright.
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel
Jun 23, 2013

Taking the long Trans-Siberian road to Japan

In the late summer of 2009, while standing hung over on a pier at Fushiki Port in Takaoka, Toyama Prefecture, one of those little-visited industrial cities on the west coast of Honshu, I suddenly found myself staring into the eyes of a tiger. This came as no surprise: It seemed a quite proper way to...
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / OUR PLANET EARTH
Jun 23, 2013

Jellyfish carry the sting of human overcrowding

It may not be immediately apparent what jellyfish, human population growth and our protein diet have in common. Take a closer look, though, and all three offer warning signs that dramatic changes are on the horizon for us and our planet.
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jun 23, 2013

'Hate speech' in the media, but not the legal code

This writer, on previous occasions, has expressed irritation over the recent tendency for the vernacular media to rely heavily on English borrowings for neologisms with socially negative connotations, such as sexual harassment, stalking and domestic violence — to name three examples.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 23, 2013

French high school curriculum includes pitfalls U.S. should try to avoid with its Common Core

The rigorous French high school curriculum comes with pitfalls that the U.S. should try to avoid as it introduces a Common Core of national standards.
Reader Mail
Jun 23, 2013

Term likens 'slaves' to livestock

The author of the June 12 article "San Francisco spurned Hashimoto amid sex slave outrage" might want to reconsider his choice of words in the last paragraph. One might "round up" cattle to be inspected or branded; one does not "round up" terrified young women to "serve as sex slaves in brothels serving...
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health
Jun 22, 2013

Robotics about to transform our notion of what is 'human'

Bertolt Meyer is used to being viewed as not fully human. Born with a stump where his left hand should have been, he spent his childhood wearing a hook connected to an elaborate pulley and harness. "To open the hook and grasp things I had to flex my shoulders like this," he says, striking a he-man pose....

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