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The consumption tax increase next April will hit every household in Japan hard, with many people's financial future hanging on whether their wages rise enough to offset the impact of the hike, experts say.
Every parent is all too familiar with The Tantrum. The screaming, the flailing arms, the angry head butting — and the timing (normally in the most inconvenient public place possible).
International events undermine Japan's democracy. Shame on the International Olympic Committee for being a party to it.
Tucked away behind the main museums in Ueno, the Tokyo University Art Museum may not be on most people’s radar, but it is definitely one of the city’s top museums in terms of curatorial quality. Whenever I go there, I am always delighted by ...
Francisco Liriano showed up at PNC Park on Tuesday afternoon in a suit with his suitcase packed for a trip St. Louis. The message reverberated through the Pittsburgh Pirates clubhouse. After 21 years away from the playoffs, it was time for the best story ...
Colin Jones is a law professor living in Kyoto. He has written four books in Japanese and tries (tries!) to make the subject of Japanese law interesting to non-specialist readers. He is from a bunch of places, but mostly Canada.
For Colin P.A. Jones's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
A responsibility-shirking government is ultimately the people's problem — and responsibility — just as much as the nuclear disaster and all the nation's other problems are, argues Colin P.A. Jones.
The prime minister's dogged focus on amending the American-tainted Constitution might reflect an uncomfortable unspoken truth — that it may be easier to change the Constitution than revise another document of potentially greater importance: the Status of Forces Agreement between Japan and the United ...
Whether it happens or not depends heavily on the results of the upcoming House of Councilors elections, but Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has clearly announced his intention to make amending the Constitution a campaign issue. Although his Liberal Democratic Party issued a comprehensive amendment ...
As Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Cabinet rush to diminish the Bank of Japan’s bothersome independence, join the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations (sort of . . .), start pouring lovely, popular concrete before the summer House of Councilors elections and (sotto voce) maybe even ...
Within two hours of the massive earthquake that jolted Japan at 2:46 p.m. on March 11, 2011, the Japanese government received notice that an “Article 15 event” had occurred at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant.
Japan has a new hara. No, the nice couple down the hall didn't just have a baby; according to recent news, yet another form of harassment is supposedly becoming a social problem.
With Shinzo Abe having called Japan’s current Constitution “pathetic” (mittomonai) just a few days before taking charge of a government established under it, constitutional amendment seems likely to be on the agenda of his second go as prime minister. This should not surprise anyone, ...
I spent a beautiful Sunday in May of this year taking a national law exam. I did not pass and wasn’t expecting to: I could barely work up the energy for the 90-minute commute to the test venue in Osaka, let alone study for ...
Given the momentous fiscal and social problems Japan was facing even before Fukushima, even foreign residents — who can’t vote — may be wondering what on Earth Japan’s elected officials are doing to solve the nation’s many ills. “Not very much” is the most ...
A few weeks ago, as a panelist at a symposium on Japan’s accession to the Hague Convention on international child abduction, I found it hard to disguise my ire. One of the speakers was a lawyer opposed to Japan joining the convention, and who ...
One of my goals in writing for The Japan Times over the years has been to try to render the seemingly arcane functioning of the Japanese legal system a bit more comprehensible to non-Japanese, non-legal types. This involves a big assumption that I understand ...
Several months ago I made a bet with a friend about how the Hague Convention on international child abduction will be applied after Japan finishes implementing it through domestic legislation. My bet was this: If a Japanese court ever does order the return of ...