Evidently I was wrong. Two weeks ago in this space, in a passing reference to the unanimous Sept. 4 Supreme Court ruling declaring unconstitutional a Civil Code provision denying full inheritance rights to heirs born out of wedlock, I wrote, “The rank injustice of ...

“The past century is a history of sexual distortion,” social psychologist Hiroyoshi Ishikawa told Time Magazine in 1983. “A small portion of young people in Japan are sexually very, very active,” he added, “while the vast majority are sexually repressed.” What would he say ...

You didn’t need prophetic powers, back in the 1980s when the personal computer was starting to show its potential, to foresee something like Internet addiction. It should have been obvious. It was, to science-fiction writer William Gibson. Reminiscing to Time magazine in 1995, he ...

Every day some 370,000 babies are born worldwide. Of those born on July 22, 2013, 369,999 went unnoticed outside their immediate circles. The exception was a royal prince, third in line to the British throne. His first photos show him blissfully unaware of the ...

Pity the declining male in an age of expanding female empowerment! True, he has only himself to blame. For centuries, millennia, man lorded over woman, subjecting her to every indignity, reducing her to servitude, denying her full membership in the community of human beings. ...

“What if my wife and I die? What if we get dementia? How will our son live?” “Mr. A” is 63; the son he’s worried about is 35 and has never held a full-time job. Part-time work he has done, but not lately — ...

If our age is rich in anything, it is, one would think (wrongly), rich in things to talk about. How can anyone nowadays be at a loss for words? What excuse is there for awkward silence? The merest glance at a newspaper furnishes conversational ...

Someday people will look back in astonishment at the way society treated women. Women haven’t always been regarded as an inferior species. In prehistoric, preagricultural Japan, archaeologists tell us, an instinctive reverence for procreation cast an aura of awe upon the bearers and nurturers ...

“A solitary cloud wafted by the wind.” Thus the 17th-century wandering haiku poet Matsuo Basho described himself. Not an ordained priest, he nonetheless wore priestly garb on his journeys and was steeped in the principles of Zen Buddhism, among which solitude ranks high. Japan’s ...