Tag - the-view-from-new-york

 
 

THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Sep 27, 2009
Hatoyama just calling it as it is
NEW YORK — I was startled to receive a letter from a friend in Tokyo earlier this month accompanied by a Sankei Shimbun article by Yukio Okamoto sharply upbraiding Yukio Hatoyama.
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Aug 30, 2009
Media connivance in walking the dogs of war
NEW YORK — For five days following Japan's surrender this month in 1945, the Mainichi Shimbun, by then reduced to a single sheet because of severe paper shortages, published editions with a good deal of blank space: on Aug. 16, Page 2 totally blank; on the 17th, not just Page 2 but also a third...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Jul 26, 2009
Blunderbuss followup to the invasion of Iraq
NEW YORK — The New York Times editorial on June 30, "The First Deadline," showed America's egocentrism at its worst. Dealing entirely with a single subject — the withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraqi cities, with 130,000 soldiers still remaining in the country — the lengthy...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Jun 28, 2009
Mythmaking and the Kamikaze 'volunteers'
NEW YORK — Lisa Hosokawa Garber, a fresh graduate of St. Andrews Presbyterian College in North Carolina, has sent me "Crosswind," her short, imaginative account of three months in the life of a youth training to be a Kamikaze pilot. It describes what its author calls a Shakespearean "twist of fate":...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
May 31, 2009
Japan's wartime sentiment toward China
NEW YORK — What were the Japanese saying when their country plunged into a war in 1937 that would last eight years and end in utter defeat?
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Apr 26, 2009
Recalling 'the fall of the Yasuda Auditorium' and the end of Japan's student movement
At a friend's Easter Sunday dinner party, I asked, "What do you think the student movement of the '60s in the U.S. accomplished?" One guest answered, "Obama's election." Unexpected but true: in this country, the opposition to the Vietnam war went hand in hand with the movement that culminated, in federal...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Mar 29, 2009
Hold the SOS call on the Japanese language
Will the Japanese language die, crushed by the onslaught of English? This question has set off some heated talk in Japan recently because of a book suggesting that it may. First, a friend of mine in Tokyo, a member of a small reading club, told me about it. Then another friend wrote to say the book became...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Mar 1, 2009
What 'prohibition' has wrought
NEW YORK — When I read the news that the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy "blasted the U.S.-led drug war as a failure that is pushing Latin American societies to the breaking point" (Wall Street Journal, Feb. 12), I thought: Someone is finally talking sense. I have long regarded...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Jan 25, 2009
Repercussions of war gone bad
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COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Dec 29, 2008
Suppressing more than free speech
I recently read a book that, a decade ago, created a controversy in Japan about homosexuality. In it the prize-winning writer Jiro Fukushima described his sexual relationship with Yukio Mishima dating from 1951.
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Nov 24, 2008
Burst of U.S. bubble arouses old specters
So the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has spoken: The "usual tools of economic policy — above all, the Federal Reserve's ability to pump up the economy by cutting interest rates — have lost all traction" ("Depression Economics Return," Nov. 14, The New York Times).
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Oct 27, 2008
Democratic pretension vs. airs of entitlement
NEW YORK — "I was honestly dumfounded," Akira Ueda recently wrote, "when I learned that the gold medalist judoka Satoshi Ishii told the Emperor, 'I fought for you, Your Majesty.' " Ishii made that statement when Olympic medalists and others were invited to tea at the Imperial Palace by the Emperor...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Sep 29, 2008
'Good old days' dispensed with body counts
NEW YORK — Driving back from Sunset Beach, North Carolina, where we spend two weeks every summer, we hugged the coastline. After crossing the 40-kilometer Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, we stopped for the first time at the Visitors Center for the Eastern Shore of Virginia National Wildlife Refuge....
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Aug 25, 2008
The longest day ever for Japan
I recently stumbled upon a YouTube recording — actually, two — of the Showa Emperor telling his subjects over the radio that Japan was accepting defeat. The first one I heard was what appeared to be a cleaned-up version; the second was the one with static, bits of which I had heard before....
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Jul 28, 2008
The U.S. Supreme Court's risible reasoning
Laws are subject to interpretations, courts are official interpreters, and the Supreme Court has the last word. That is a fact of life, though it is also a fact of life that you sometimes wonder if there is anything "supreme" about the Supreme Court. Yes, you know that individual justices come with individual...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Jun 30, 2008
Justices made right call on habeas corpus
Among the commentaries I've read about a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, the one from George F. Will (The Japan Times, June 24) surprised me. The conservative columnist for The Washington Post upbraided Sen. John McCain for condemning Boumediene v. Bush — which upheld the right of habeas corpus...
COMMENTARY / Japan / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
May 28, 2008
Behind the failure of the Japanese economy
Takafusa Shioya has sent me his book published last year, "Keizai Saisei no Joken" (Conditions for Economic Recovery). Nearly three decades ago, during a period of a few years when Jimmy Carter's presidency morphed into Ronald Reagan's, he was stationed in the New York outpost of a Japanese trade office...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Apr 28, 2008
Bush's brutal war stirs memories of Vietnam
When the news came that Daniel Ellsberg led a rally in Concord, New Hampshire, to help impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, I happened to be looking at the entries for the year 1967 in an almanac.
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Mar 31, 2008
Oxymoronic sustenance and sustainability
NEW YORK — Earlier this month there was held, in a midtown hotel, an International Conference on Climate Change. Yet another one? you might ask. But, no, this one was to make the case that Al Gore, with his argument in "An Inconvenient Truth" is a fraud, a swindler. One of the conferees' premises...
COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK
Feb 25, 2008
Is ethnic passing finally becoming passe?
NEW YORK — Just about the time Bliss Broyard's book "One Drop" came out last year, I received the latest book from my prolific friend Inuhiko Yomota, "Japan's Marrano Literature."

Longform

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