Transport authorities launched a full-fledged investigation Sunday into the derailment of a bullet train on the Akita Shinkansen Line in Daisen, Akita Prefecture, on Saturday afternoon.
It's a dangerous, unpredictable world. Twice in January Chinese warships in the East China Sea challenged Japan's Maritime Self Defense Forces patrols in a manner deemed threatening. And on Feb. 12 came North Korea's nuclear test.
Here's an open secret: Japanese men have a bad international reputation on the romance front.
SELLING WOMEN: Prostitution, Markets and the Household in Early Modern Japan, by Amy Stanley. University of California Press, 2012, 282 pp., $49.95 (hardcover) In the vast cultural landscape, Japan fascinates the mainstream with manga and anime, the martial arts, Zen and kimono. Of course, ...
Kenta Maeda shook off worries about his form with five shutout innings as Japan beat China 5-2 in first-round Pool A of the World Baseball Classic on Sunday at Fukuoka Dome. Japan improved to 2-0 following a tough win over Brazil in Saturday evening’s ...
DEMOCRACY WITH A GUN; America and the Policy of Force, by Fumio Matsuo, translated by David Reese. Berkeley, California: Stone Bridge Press, 2007, 306 pp., $26 (cloth) As a child in wartime Japan, Fumio Matsuo, now a journalist, and his family were nearly wiped ...
Events in Tibet have turned ugly. Once again we see the harm caused by Beijing’s heavy-handed bureaucracy, and its panicky, untrained soldiers used for crowd control. But even when combined with all of Beijing’s other alleged sins — Darfur, pollution, human rights and other ...
Australia is never short of surprises. One is the way it has produced a prime minister, Kevin Rudd, who can talk directly with the Chinese leadership in their language. Reports say his Mandarin Chinese is excellent. Yet only a generation ago anyone in Canberra ...
Another year, another budget. And yet another increase in public debt as tax revenues yet again fail to provide the funds needed even for the budget’s highly restricted outlays. And yet another prediction of miserable 1 to 2 percent growth rates, together with the ...
In some ways China is not my favorite country. I once went to some trouble to learn its language. I have often had to court rightwing hostility for trying to explain its foreign policies in less than demonic terms. Back in 1971 I even ...
My French aunt died the other day. She was lovely woman. But sadly she was also a terrorist. Born British, she had married a member of the French World War II Resistance forces fighting the Nazi occupation of their country. He had been betrayed ...
Western media have reported Japan’s new prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, as drab and unexciting and even as “lukewarm pizza.” But anyone who watched him during his more than three-year stint as chief Cabinet secretary would know that he has a sharp mind and a ...
DAVIS, Calif. — Modern economists have turned Adam Smith into a prophet, just as communist regimes once deified Karl Marx. The central tenet they attribute to Smith — that good incentives, regardless of culture, produce good results — has become the great commandment of ...
Each year we have to ask the same question as world leaders drag themselves across the globe, taking days from their crowded schedules, simply to hand out platitudes on the importance of free trade, the environment or some other trendy topic of the day. ...
Why is the world so reluctant to accept partition as the answer to ethnic, religious or political conflicts? The Kosovo conflict may finally be moving in that direction, but only after all sides debased themselves by years of murderous conflict. In Iraq, too, the ...
