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BUSINESS / Markets / CURRENCY MARKET
Jul 9, 2014

Japan may act to weaken yen: Pierpont

Japan may intervene to weaken its currency as the yen approaches its strongest level versus the dollar this year, according to Pierpont Securities LLC.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Jul 8, 2014

Japan's innovation challenge

The Abe administration's capacity for deciding how to raise the birthrate, improve child-care facilities, realize an appropriae work-life balance and promote other 'innovations' that enable Japan to solve its many problems is now being tested.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 8, 2014

Xi's fumbles give Obama's pivot a second chance

Years from now, when the history of Barack Obama's much-maligned 'pivot to Asia' is written, he may owe a debt of gratitude to Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose overbearing ways in the region are giving Obama a second wind.
Japan Times
WORLD / Politics
Jul 8, 2014

Putin silent on fighting in Slaviansk

Three weeks before Ukraine's army forced rebel fighters out of the strategic eastern city of Slaviansk, their commander made a desperate plea for military help from Russia.
Japan Times
BASEBALL / Japanese Baseball / HIT AND RUN
Jul 7, 2014

BayStars' Gourriel could be in line for rare honor

The Yokohama BayStars don't look like they're going to do much winning this season. The team can, however, be associated with at least one historic victory at the conclusion of the season.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Jul 7, 2014

Can Japan's democracy survive Abe's designs?

Many Japanese are so happy to have a leader who's acting boldly that they seem willing to give Shinzo Abe the benefit of the doubt when he does exactly what they and others oppose.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Jul 7, 2014

High test scores, low expectations

Young people in Japan, like their counterparts in the U.S., know that high scores on tests have little to do with their job prospects. So why do a higher percentage of American students still report being hopeful about their prospects for a good life?
Japan Times
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Jul 7, 2014

It's all a matter of character — but which one to choose?

Much has been made of the alleged difficulty of the Japanese language for non-native and even native speakers. My personal impression is that this view is most commonly cherished by two types of people: those who don't know much Japanese (or any at all), and those who only know Japanese.
BUSINESS
Jul 7, 2014

GPIF posts first quarterly loss since 2012 on sagging stock market

Japan's stock rout in the quarter through March spurred the first loss for the world's biggest pension fund in almost two years, just as it moves toward buying more equities.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Jul 5, 2014

Fiery Shinjuku protest goes global without NHK

Until the Great East Japan Earthquake, social media didn't have much purchase on Japanese social life. But disasters are transformative, and in a country where the mass media is cautious about its role vis-a-vis the authorities, social media came into its own after the tsunami and meltdown.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jul 5, 2014

Ongoing Obokata story seeks out scandal

The paper, titled "Stimulus-triggered fate conversion of somatic cells into pluripotency," was accepted by the British science journal Nature on Dec. 20, 2013, and published online on Jan. 29, 2014. The authors were listed as Haruko Obokata, Teruhiko Wakayama, Yoshiki Sasai, Koji Kojima, Martin P. Vacanti,...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 4, 2014

The age of intelligent robots

When a chatbot can convince judges at Britain's Royal Society that it is a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy with limited English skills, it may be time to worry about a computer taking your job.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 4, 2014

Is the U.K.-Europe marriage beyond salvation?

The nomination of a 'federalist' to head the European Commission shows that the EU is institutionally dedicated to the idea of ever closer union, regardless of what its citizens, especially Britons, actually want.
WORLD
Jul 4, 2014

Queen Elizabeth names Britain's biggest warship

Queen Elizabeth will officially name the biggest warship Britain has ever built on Friday, the latest step in a 6.2 billion pound ($10.6 billion) project to build a new generation of aircraft carriers.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 3, 2014

China's reach for leverage

China's random and sporadic acts of provocations over territorial disputes seem to fail to intimidate its opponents in the Asia-Pacific region, but each push and probe tests retaliatory assets and calls into question the U.S. capacity, and will, to come to the aid of a beleaguered ally.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 3, 2014

While Japan presses North on abductions, South Korea victims are forgotten

Kim Young-nam was a teenager living on the coast of South Korea when he disappeared in 1978, only to turn up in North Korea. There, he met and married Megumi Yokota, a Japanese national abducted by North Korean agents on her way home from school a year earlier.
JAPAN / Politics
Jul 2, 2014

U.S. hails defense revamp

Tuesday's decision by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Cabinet to reinterpret the Constitution to allow collective self-defense has divided Japan, with some people fearing it would drag the nation into a U.S.-led war.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 2, 2014

Evacuation plans stir fresh doubts over Japan nuclear restarts

Keen to restart nuclear power plants three years after the Fukushima disaster, authorities may face an additional hurdle in securing approval — coming up with a cogent evacuation plan in the event of new accidents.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 2, 2014

Babylon still trembles at Jamaica's cult classic

Flashback: It's midnight at the Orson Welles Cinema, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980. Perry Henzell's breakthrough Jamaican film "The Harder They Come" has been playing here every weekend for nearly a decade now, but tonight it's still a full house. As the lights go down, the audience sparks up, and within...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 2, 2014

'Nanpu (Riding the Breeze)'

Movies about women who fly off to foreign climes to reboot their lives are a thriving subgenre, though the heroines are mostly from well-off countries, Japan included. Women from the more troubled parts of the world may also cross borders to start new lives, but their motives are less often self-discovery...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 2, 2014

High-energy Ono conducts a rare 'Hoffmann' critique

He is known best for the rapturously hysterical "Infernal Gallop" (aka "The Can-can") from his 1858 operetta "Orpheus in the Underworld," but the German-born, naturalized-French composer Jacques Offenbach (1819-80) is credited with just one full-length, serious opera — "The Tales of Hoffmann" — which...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 2, 2014

Son's film reveals secret workings of stage maestro Peter Brook's art

Peter Brook is a titan in the world of theater. Now aged 89, the director staged his first work, Christopher Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus," in 1942. After a groundbreaking stint at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s, in 1970 the London-born director co-founded the International Centre for Theatre...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 2, 2014

History moves, but not always ahead

Victors of World War II find themselves unable to win the wars they wage against peasant societies. They combine self-righteousness with the perception of failure and decline.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 1, 2014

GM is no transformer and that's the problem

General Motors' inability to look outside of itself for talent, relying on company lifers even in the face of undeniable evidence of deep cultural rot, is what you'd expect from a corporation for which sponsoring a movie about car-robots from outer space seems to count as a meaningful step toward actual transformation.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 1, 2014

Time to say goodbye to the business cycle?

The many failures of economics before, during and after the recent financial crisis have left an intellectual vacuum. It seems that governments' past success in stabilizing the economy in the short run encouraged too much debt and instability in the long term.
JAPAN / Politics
Jun 30, 2014

Ishin-Komeito ties fray in Osaka

Relations between Nippon Ishin no Kai (Japan Restoration Party) and New Komeito continue to deteriorate, with party heads Toru Hashimoto and Ichiro Matsui preparing to challenge two Osaka-based New Komeito leaders in the next Lower House election.
Japan Times
WORLD / Politics / ANALYSIS
Jun 30, 2014

Despite wowing West, Ukraine leader dependent on Putin

Three weeks into his job, President Petro Poroshenko looks like a man in a hurry.

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