26
P/CLOUDY
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 ...
For John Naughton's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
When Steve Jobs was still with us, many commentators — yours truly included — used to complain about the “reality distortion field” that surrounded Apple’s charismatic leader. Those in attendance when Jobs launched the devices and services (iPod, iTunes, OS X, iMac, MacBook, iPhone ...
Some things never change. For as long as I can remember, people in the west have been paranoid about the Orient — and about China in particular. I grew up in an ultra-devout Catholic household in rural Ireland and I remember my mother being ...
“It’s an ill bird,” runs the adage, “that fouls its own nest.” Cue the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), which, we now know, has been busily doing this for quite a while. As the revelations by Edward Snowden tumbled out, the scale of the ...
When the news broke last week that Ronald Coase, the economist and Nobel laureate, had died at the age of 102, what came immediately to mind was Keynes’ observation that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are ...
Should you be looking for an example of hucksterish cynicism, then the mantra that “data is the new oil” is as good as they come. Although its first recorded uttering goes as far back as 2006, in recent times it has achieved the status ...
So the proprietor of the Huffington Post has decided to ban anonymous commenting from the site, starting in mid-September. Speaking to reporters after a conference in Boston, Massachusetts, Arianna Huffington said: “Trolls are just getting more and more aggressive and uglier and I just ...
Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make credulous. In the case of technology, especially technology involving computers, that’s pretty easy to do. Quite why people are so overawed by computers when they are blasé about, say, truly miraculous technologies such as ...
Do you think that, as a society, the United States has become a basket case? Well, join the club. I’m not just thinking of the country’s dysfunctional Congress, pathological infatuation with firearms, addiction to litigation, crazy healthcare arrangements, engorged prison system, chronic inequality, 50-year-old ...
Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world’s mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not ...
Once upon a time, a young man named Bill had a vision. He saw “a PC on every desk, and every machine running Microsoft software.” And lo, it came to pass, and the company Bill cofounded became a gigantic machine for making money, and ...
Two years ago, when it was discovered that a U.S. intelligence agency was pouring millions of dollars into a research project on “metaphor,” some people thought it was a delayed April Fool’s joke. This columnist begged to differ, on the grounds that metaphors are ...
Over the past two weeks, I have lost count of the number of officials and government ministers who, when challenged about Internet surveillance by Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States, try to reassure their citizens ...