In his inaugural address as 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama said: “We remain a young nation but, in the words of the Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.” The words he quoted are from St. Paul’s First ...

Crises come and crises go, but this one seems to be in a class of its own. And now that it has arrived, it doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon. The media started out by talking about the credit crunch. Now the ...

So now we know. Aso the “manga” man cannot read Japanese. At least not when it is written in kanji. The newspapers have been full of revelations these past few weeks about Prime Minister Taro Aso’s slipups in the art of kanji deciphering. Mind ...

Since when was Halloween such a big thing in Japan? Admittedly, you could see it coming these past few years. But this autumn it is simply everywhere. Those violently orange pumpkin faces with black grins spring out at you in the most incongruous settings, ...

The accepted wisdom seems to be that Japan is being less affected than most by the ongoing banking crisis. I wouldn’t bank on it. True, for the moment we are not having it as bad as the Americans or the Europeans. Yet there is ...

When the Doha Round of trade negotiations broke down some weeks ago, no one was particularly surprised. Nor did anyone seem to care all that much. Indeed, people appeared to take the collapse of the talks as the seal of approval to go ahead ...

Does the presence of a safety net make people too reckless, lazy and dependent? Or does it allow people to experiment, develop skills in a secure environment and prevent the penalization of healthy high spirits. This could be an argument about how to run ...

Look at these numbers: 21, 35 and 1,000. What kind of vital statistics would you say these were? The amount of calories you need to deny yourself to get back into shape? The number needed on your point card to earn the cash back ...

As surely as night follows day, credit crunches are followed by recessions, if not great depressions. Whether we are on the verge of a 21st century version of the 1930s, however, still remains to be seen. But the possibility or even the probability of ...

“The Closing of the American Mind” is a book that no doubt many readers will be familiar with. As an indictment of higher education and the corrosion of the intellect in 1980s America, this book caused a sensation and earned well deserved acclaim. I ...

Nature abhors a vacuum. So said Aristotle. Human beings also abhor a vacuum. Especially when they are LDP politicians in search of a new governor for the Bank of Japan. Their frenzied search for someone and anyone to fill the gap has provided fascinating ...

Just recently I took part in a very interesting discussion program for NHK television in which economists and strategists from around the world came together to debate the state of the global economy and what kind of a beating the financial markets were liable ...