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JAPAN / Q&A
Sep 7, 2011

Prestigious school seen as ticket to rise to the top of political ladder

Newly appointed Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda may compare himself to a "dojo" (loach), but in reality he is an elite politician with a diploma from the Matsushita Institute of Government and Management, better known as Matsushita Seikei Juku.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 7, 2011

Time to end the great American bank robbery

That $5 trillion dollars is not money invested in building roads, schools, and other long-term projects, but is directly transferred from the American economy to the personal accounts of bank executives and employees. Such transfers represent as cunning a tax on everyone else as one can imagine. It feels...
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 7, 2011

Shared regional interests draw Japan and India closer

Over the past decade, India and Japan have built a relationship of strategic cooperation to promote collaboration on regional and global issues. An examination of the current situation indicates that their relations are a sum greater than its parts.
COMMENTARY
Sep 5, 2011

Revolution no boon to the Copts

Ugly reality has dashed the high hopes of the "Arab Spring." In Egypt the fall of Hosni Mubarak has encouraged religious intolerance and persecution, especially against the Coptic Christian community.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 5, 2011

'Top Gun' blazed a trail for war propaganda

Americans are souring on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military budget is under siege as Congress looks for spending to cut. And the army is reporting record suicide rates among soldiers.
CULTURE / Books
Sep 4, 2011

Flowering of civic activism

MAKING JAPANESE CITIZENS: Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan, by Simon Andrew Avenell. University of California Press, 2010, 356 pp., $24.95 (paper) In recent years the growth of civil society in Japan has attracted considerable attention. The invaluable contributions of Japanese...
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Sep 2, 2011

Sony: Movies give its tablet edge over iPad

Sony Corp. is betting its tablet computers will rival Apple Inc.'s iPad by luring buyers with music and movies, even as the company arrives more than a year late in the booming market for such devices.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 29, 2011

Palestinian state must field Israeli concerns

Israelis and Palestinians are preparing for a showdown at the United Nations in September, when the Palestinian leadership will ask for recognition of a Palestinian state within the borders that existed before the Six Day War in 1967 (when Israel seized control of Jordanian-occupied territory).
ENVIRONMENT / OUR PLANET EARTH
Aug 28, 2011

Is youth's 'creeping passivity' happening by design?

Last February, I wrote an Our Planet Earth column titled "Don't give up on Japan's kids," noting there that despite all the hand-wringing that goes on about this nation's young people, my own experience with university students gives me cause for considerable optimism.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 27, 2011

The GOP's tax increase hits the wrong target

America's presumably anti-tax party wants to raise your taxes. Come January, the Republicans plan to raise the taxes of anyone who earns $50,000 a year by $1,000, and anyone who makes $100,000 by $2,000.
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink
Aug 26, 2011

Curry — it's more 'Japanese' than you think

To many people in Japan, summertime is synonymous with hot and spicy food. Spices are believed to cool you down by making you perspire, as well as stimulating an appetite dulled by the sweltering weather. The quintessential spicy dish in Japan is curry, which is so popular that it's regarded, along with...
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 25, 2011

No more ping-pong diplomacy

Thirty years ago, when China was still closed off to most of the world, Chairman Mao Zedong invited a group of American table-tennis players to participate in a week of friendly exhibition matches around the country. Insular and impoverished, China was just emerging from the most chaotic years of the...
COMMENTARY
Aug 24, 2011

Squaring the U.S., China, Taiwan triangle

Nothing causes greater discord in relations between the United States and China than the status of Taiwan, officially known as the Republic of China.
JAPAN / EXPLAINER
Aug 23, 2011

Restoring foreign tourism tall order

Foreign tourist numbers have been plunging since the March 11 quake, tsunami and nuclear crisis in Fukushima Prefecture, and not only for visitors to the disaster zone.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 23, 2011

U.S.-China economic stage

In conventional mass media and online of late, one can discover abundant information describing the unprecedented scale and intensity of industrial cooperation and capital migration between the United States and China.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Aug 21, 2011

A blood donor to the masses

The bug days are here again. Shades of green are deepening in the debilitating heat of a summer that's made more of a hardship this year due to the post-March 11 energy-saving efficiencies required of us.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Aug 21, 2011

Modernity on the move

Movement is central to modernity. Baudelaire's flaneur, a walker drifting through city streets, "a perfect idler, ... a passionate observer," who is a part of the urban throng even as he remains apart from it, is paradigmatic.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 18, 2011

Fall of Berlin Wall wasn't the end of barriers

Fifty years ago, on Aug. 13, under the cover of darkness, East Germany broke ground on the construction of the Berlin Wall, which became one of the most iconic symbols of violence and exclusion the world has ever known.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 17, 2011

Remembering the towering walls of August

History's milestones are rarely so neatly arrayed as they are this summer. Fifty years ago this month, the Berlin Wall was born. After some hesitation, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union's leader, allowed his East German counterpart, Walter Ulbricht, to erect a barrier between East and West Berlin in...
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 17, 2011

Japan at critical tipping point

Japanese trains run to the minute, and the country's businesses pride themselves on energy-efficiency. The Japanese boast of their eco-services for eco-products in eco-cities. Yet they rely primarily on imported fossil fuel and nuclear power, live in energy-wasteful homes, and import 60 percent of their...
BASKETBALL
Aug 16, 2011

Allred finalizes deal with Hannaryz

Former NBA center Lance Allred has agreed to contractual terms to play for the Kyoto Hannaryz this season, the bj-league team announced on Monday.
Japan Times
JAPAN / History
Aug 14, 2011

Japan's unsung role in India's struggle for independence

Nestled in the upmarket Wada district of Tokyo's Suginami Ward, Renkoji Temple is a model of gentility. On weekday mornings, pensioners sit and sketch its prayer hall while housewives chat quietly in the shade of its well-tended trees. Given this setting, it would be easy to mistake the bust of a bespectacled...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Aug 14, 2011

A heady witches' brew of midsummer nightmares

Aside from the Summer High School Baseball Tournament at Koshien Stadium and NHK documentaries reminiscing about World War II, mid-August tends to be a quiet time and most of Japan's weekly magazines skip an issue.
BUSINESS
Aug 13, 2011

Fewer orders seen as warning sign

A four-month slump in foreign orders for Japanese machinery may be the latest sign that waning demand is threatening to derail the global economic recovery.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 10, 2011

Hosni Mubarak's last laugh?

August 3, 2011, will be remembered as a historic day in Egypt. Former President Hosni Mubarak was put on public trial, together with his two sons and his ex-interior minister, General Habib el-Adly. The repercussions for Egypt, indeed for the entire Arab world, will be profound.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 10, 2011

A key lesson from America's first debt crisis

The West is ensnared in a debt crisis. The United States, as everyone knows, came perilously close to defaulting on Aug. 2, and Standard & Poor's downgraded U.S. debt from AAA on Aug. 5.
COMMENTARY
Aug 9, 2011

Threat from the antidemocrats

The recent massacre perpetrated by a lone gunman in Norway has made leaders in democratic countries review the threat to their societies from extremist anti-democratic elements.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 9, 2011

'Financial repression' and other remedies

Early in the financial crisis, a major emerging-market investor told me: "This is not a global, but a semi-global financial crisis." He was right: it really was a crisis of the United States, Europe and Japan. Among emerging markets, only Eastern Europe was badly hit. Indeed, the crisis marks the emerging...
CULTURE / Books
Aug 7, 2011

Ultimate guide to boozing in Japan

DRINKING JAPAN: A Guide to Japan's Best Drinks and Drinking Establishments, by Chris Bunting, Tuttle Publishing, 2011, 272 pp., $24.95 (paper) I don't recall who wrote the line "If Venice is built on water, Tokyo is built on alcohol," but the author was spot on. Its not only the capital, but the entire...

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