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Japan Times
BASKETBALL / BJ-LEAGUE NOTEBOOK
Oct 5, 2012

Nash hungry to build off Grouses' success last season

Bob Nash has been around the game long enough to know that he doesn't need to go out of his way to complicate things.
Japan Times
BUSINESS / YEN FOR LIVING
Oct 4, 2012

Money for education ends up in the toilet

Officials finally realize that public school lavatories have been neglected too long.
COMMUNITY / How-tos / LIFELINES
Oct 2, 2012

Companies liable for drug trial damages

MJ is considering using an experimental drug that his doctor has offered to treat colitis, but isn't sure who is responsible if anything goes wrong.
COMMUNITY / Voices / HAVE YOUR SAY
Oct 2, 2012

Divergent views on Debito; the fate of mixed-nationality kids

Arudou's writing still needed Most of the readers who indignantly criticize the writings of Debito Arudou seem to share the same outlook. Arudou, they say, should shut up and accept the good with the bad.
Reader Mail
Sep 30, 2012

Noda's about-face a plain shame

Regarding the Sept. 20 front-page article "Cabinet fails to OK new nuclear strategy": Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has been criticized for backtracking on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and on the government's recent pledge to aim for zero dependence on nuclear power by 2030. Backtracking on TPP...
Reader Mail
Sep 30, 2012

Getting Taiwan on Japan's side

Regarding the Sept. 26 front-page article "50 Taiwanese boats intrude near Senkakus": I do support Japan in this conflict, but this is a major problem as long as China shows such lust for control. A brilliant way to stop this would be a 100-year-long agreement with Taiwan. It would be a needle in the...
Reader Mail
Sep 30, 2012

Limits of antinuclear credibility

The Sept. 16 Timeout article on antinuclear campaigner Arnie Gundersen, titled "The government could still save lives'," sadly delves into scaremongering. Gundersen's claims of massive casualties from xenon and krypton isotopes is not supported in scientific literature. That's because of a few factors:...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Sep 30, 2012

Born guilty: child of a North Korean gulag

Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom in the West, by Blaine Harden. Viking, 2012, 224 pp., $26.95 (hardcover) While reading "Escape from Camp 14," be prepared for horrifying passages that plumb the depths of viciousness to which both the jailed and their jailers...
COMMENTARY
Sep 29, 2012

Two missed opportunities for Japan in island disputes

Since I have been requested to express my views on the territorial issues concerning the Takeshima islets and Senkaku Islands on several occasions recently, I thought it opportune to compile them into one coherent argument.
CULTURE / Film
Sep 28, 2012

'The Bourne Legacy' / 'Haywire'

If going to the movies has taught me anything, it's that being a spy ain't easy. Even if the guy is a graduate of the School of Uber-spies, with perfect abs and hair streaming in the wind as the bad guys in black Mercedes come yelling in Euro accents. In fact, the more uber a spy is, the more tribulations...
COMMENTARY / World / SENTAKU MAGAZINE
Sep 24, 2012

Power industry campaigns to pull the plug on the DPJ

Japan's electric power industry is using its political clout to help candidates who are sympathetic to its cause win seats in the Lower House. The next general election of the Diet chamber is rumored to take place as early as this autumn.
Reader Mail
Sep 23, 2012

The rationale for redistribution

In his Sept. 14 article, "Ruinous GOP tax fantasies," writer Kevin Rafferty asserts that income redistribution is self-evidently moral. On what principles does he base this assertion?
Reader Mail
Sep 23, 2012

Panetta should worry about U.S.

Regarding the Sept. 18 article "Panetta tells Japan, China to resolve Senkaku row peacefully": U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has a lot of nerve telling Japan and China what to do.
OLYMPICS
Sep 21, 2012

Taiwanese IOC member assures Tokyo over vote

Relations between Japan, China and Taiwan have spiraled out of control over the past week, but a longtime Taiwanese International Olympic Committee member is not using that as a pretext for his vote for the 2020 Summer Olympics.
COMMENTARY
Sep 21, 2012

What grooms a physician to oversee torture?

It was an unusual event in July at the Libertad (Freedom) prison in Uruguay. Miguel Angel Estrella, an Argentine pianist, was giving a concert in the same prison where he had been imprisoned and tortured 32 years earlier.
EDITORIALS
Sep 21, 2012

LDP leadership fight

The campaigns of the five candidates competing in the Liberal Democratic Party election are in full swing. At least two themes are very apparent in the race. One is that faction leaders and party elders appear to be regaining power in the nation's No. 1 opposition party, which lost the reigns of power...
Reader Mail
Sep 20, 2012

China's famous revisionist efforts

Jeff Kingston's Sept. 16 article, "The long tradition of sanitizing history" (which is a book review of "Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering" by John W. Dower), is a timely reminder of the self-defeating nature of historical revisionism.
Reader Mail
Sep 20, 2012

India a natural partner for Japan

Regarding the Sept. 17 Kyodo article "Anti-Japan protests a double-edged sword": India and its people would welcome the Japanese moving their factories from China to India.
Reader Mail
Sep 20, 2012

Government arrogance to blame

Regarding the Sept. 18 front-page article "China warns anti-Japanese demonstrators against further violence": We have the arrogant Japanese government to thank for the current situation between Japan and China. You can't tell me that Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda didn't know that demonstrations would...
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 20, 2012

Coming to grips with Libya's jihadists

"They are armed and I am not going to fight a losing battle and kill my men over a demolished shrine," said Fawzi Abd al-'Aali, the former Libyan interior minister, before he "resigned" last August.
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Sep 19, 2012

Japanese companies become protest targets in China

As anti-Japan protests in China rage with no end in sight, Japanese businesses there are seeing their operations disrupted, while government officials seek to limit the damage to economic ties.
Reader Mail
Sep 16, 2012

Don't fear the Chinese periscope

Regarding Michael Richardson's Sept. 12 article, "New ships give China's navy a stronger punch": No matter how determined China is to modernize and expand its navy/military presence and its influence in the Asia-Pacific region, the U.S. Navy is light-years ahead. The Pentagon saw this challenge a long...
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Sep 16, 2012

Japan's depressing increase in psychoactive drug use

In July, the British pharmaceutical behemoth GlaxoSmithKline reached a $3 billion settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice over the company's illegal marketing of several drugs in the United States. One of these, the antidepressant Paxil, was pushed by GSK salespersons for treating children, even...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Sep 16, 2012

The long tradition of sanitizing history

Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World, by John W. Dower. New Press, 2012, 336 pp., $26.95 (hardcover) Toru Hashimoto, mayor of Osaka and leader of the Nippon Ishin-no Kai, recently tried to revise the history of comfort women, saying that there is no evidence that the Japanese...
Reader Mail
Sep 13, 2012

The least noble of alternatives

Regarding the Sept. 10 article "Japan minister Matsushita found dead at home in possible suicide: police": The heads of Japanese ministries and companies must understand that suicide is not noble. It brings shame to families and everyone around them.
Reader Mail
Sep 13, 2012

Yamanashi school song rankles

Regarding the Korea Times editorial titled "Japan slips into retrograde," which was reprinted in The Japan Times on Aug. 31: As a Japanese who is a member of the Society for the Annulment of Imperial Rescripts, I want the Japanese people to be courageous enough to confront the past and not be influenced...
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 12, 2012

Japan's Russia diplomacy

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda and Russian President Vladimir Putin met for the first time during the June Group of 20 summit in Mexico. When Noda proposed holding substantive talks over the Northern Territories dispute on the basis of bilateral accords and documents as well as of the principle of law...
COMMENTARY / World / SENTAKU MAGAZINE
Sep 11, 2012

Troubled waters, bad bridge

A South Korean journalist in Seoul warns that Japan should not make light of the recent series of tough actions taken by Seoul against Tokyo because they represent the beginning of a sharp turn in South Korea's policy toward Japan.
Japan Times
JAPAN / EXPLAINER
Sep 11, 2012

Isle row Rule No.1: Protect what you have

The nation's territorial disputes heated up in August when the South Korean president made an unprecedented visit to the Takeshima Islands, which his country holds, and Chinese activists briefly landed on the Japan-administered Senkaku Islands.
COMMENTARY
Sep 11, 2012

Let posterity see how the Iraq war was created

When the Iraq War Inquiry Group (of which I am a member) issued a public call for an inquiry into the decision-making that lay behind Australia's participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, members of the then-Howard government dismissed it in effect as yesterday's news.

Longform

Totopa in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward was picked by consultants TTNE as the best sauna of the year.
Japan’s sauna movement: Relax, refresh, repeat