Economy | ANALYSIS
Households to take hit from tax hike
by Tomoko Otake
The consumption tax increase will hit every household in Japan hard, with many people’s financial future hanging on whether their wages rise enough to offset the hike's impact.
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CLOUDS AND SUN
SOLDIER OF GOD: MacArthur’s Attempt to Christianize Japan, by Ray A. Moore. Merwin Asia, 2011, 167 pp., $35.00 (paperback) India, the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, the largest the world has ever known, was won mainly by attrition, though some of ...
TAMURA RYUICHI: On the Life and Work of a 20th Century Master, edited by Takako Lento & Wayne Miller. Pleiades Press, 2011, 175 pages, $12.99 (paper) The expression of the poet Ryuichi Tamura, as he looks out at the reader from the cover of ...
“Everything Is Broken: Life Inside Burma” is the second book by Emma Larkin, a Burmese-speaking American journalist who gathers her touching stories traveling incognito in Burma (aka Myanmar). Like her first book, this one has appeared in a popular edition, with a sub-title that ...
The word shunga (“spring picture”), used to identify woodblock prints that portray erotic subjects, is not simply a euphemism for the awakening of natural urges. Rather, as both these books inform us, it is an abbreviation of a longer Chinese name, shunkyu higa (“secret ...
There is a persistent hum of activity among small-press publications in Japan, much of it concerned with poetry and a good deal of it translation. IWANA, by Kurahara Shinjiro, translated by William I. Elliott & Nishihara Katsumasa. Dowaya, 2010, 131 pp., ¥2,100 (hardcover) The ...
“Trespasses” may be a puzzling term (if you grew up with the Lord’s Prayer), but in a foreword to this selection of writings by Masao Miyoshi (1928-2009), Frederic Jameson speaks of the “Victorianist who turns into a Japanologist” and of the “implacable unification of ...
EVERYTHING IS BROKEN: The Untold Story of Disaster Under Burma’s Military Regime, by Emma Larkin. Granta, 2010, 265 pp., £12.99 (paper) Tropical storms are given names by meteorological offices around the world. In English we generally prefer to be anthropomorphic, using male and female ...
WHO IS MR SATOSHI?, by Jonathan Lee. William Heinemann, 2010, 295 pp., £12.99 (hardcover) Rob Fossick, a 41-year-old photographer, is drinking a glass of butterscotch schnapps when he witnesses the death of his mother in a retirement home, and is then left to sort ...
FOREST OF EYES: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Jeffrey Angles. University of California Press, 2010, 164 pp., $19.95 (paper) These are the lines from which the title of this poetry collection comes: The town is nothing but ...
Like the ancient Greeks who were outnumbered by Persian hordes at the battle of Thermopylae, a motley gathering of British and Indian troops was almost overpowered at Kohima, but managed to resist the Japanese forces intent on taking India. Only a regiment, not a ...
The prologue to this stupendous book opens in Yamagata, where a Japanese general from World War II is struggling to atone for the deaths of soldiers who lost their lives under his command in India. They had been trying to mount an assault from ...
Of Indian and Swiss parentage, Meira Chand grew up in England and began to publish novels while living in Japan. This is her eighth full-length work of fiction, and of those, only two have been unconnected with this country — though one of those, ...