“Kokoro kara owabi mōshi-agemasu” (「心からお詫び申し上げます」 “I apologize from my heart”). The hearts of Japanese politicians must be bottomless indeed, for all the apologies that seem to ferment there. Their mouths, meanwhile, are on automatic pilot, sowing shitsugen (失言, gaffe, slip of the tongue) after ...
PLANNING FOR EMPIRE: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State, by Janis Mimura. Cornell University Press, 2011, 229 pp., ￡24.95 (hardcover) Once upon a time men were proud to call themselves fascist. “I am convinced,” wrote a leading Japanese reformist bureaucrat in the early ...
An Associated Press report of Apple Inc.’s CEO Steve Jobs’ resignation last month stated, “Jobs helped change computers from a geeky hobbyist’s obsession to a necessity of modern life at work and home.” This testifies to Jobs’ genius but fails to raise what seems ...
Kodomo teate (子供手当て, child allowance) is a benign, beneficent social policy rooted in horror, having first seen the light of day in certain European countries that had been dangerously depopulated by World War I. World War II and its carnage helped spread the idea, ...
“May you live in interesting times,” goes the familiar curse — or as the Chinese say in a similar vein, “It’s better to be a dog in times of peace than a human in times of chaos.” Unquestionably these are interesting times. It’s not ...
THE DAY THE SUN ROSE IN THE WEST: Bikini, The Lucky Dragon, and I, by Matashichi Oishi. University of Hawaii Press, 2011, 165 pp., $18 (paper) Hiroshima was nothing. Nine years later on March 1, 1954, there occurred at Bikini atoll in the Marshall ...
Two thousand eight was a dreadful year. Long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were going badly. The U.S. “subprime crisis” was strangling the global economy. Rising food prices were causing concern at best, riots at worst. The worse things got, the more helpless the ...
“Can you imagine how it feels for an innocent man to be kept in prison for years?” demanded Govinda Prasad Mainali during a Japan Times interview in November 2003. He’d been in prison six years then. He’s still there. Perhaps not for much longer. ...
Post-nuclear Japan? Probably not any time soon, but Naoto Kan last month became Japan’s first prime minister ever to take a step in that direction. He said: “Genpatsu ni izon shinai shakai wo mezasubeki da” (“原発に依存しない社会を目指すべきだ, We should aim to be a society that ...
“How wonderful! How marvelous! From here to the southeast is what the Westerners call the Pacific Ocean and the American states! They must be very close!” — Watanabe Kazan, artist and samurai, in a diary recording a sojourn in Enoshima, an island off Kamakura ...
