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P/CLOUDY
NTT DoCoMo Inc., despite being Japan’s biggest mobile phone carrier, has been struggling against tough smartphone competition from KDDI Corp. and Softbank Corp., which is leading in that area. But one edge that the cellphone behemoth — it has more than 60 million subscribers ...
Throughout most of Japan, June is the rainy season. While all that rainfall is great for rice paddies so that we can have delicious new harvest rice in the fall, it makes it a rather dull month for seasonal produce: The summer’s bounty of ...
If you don’t get into the ring once or twice, then you’re a coward, Geoffrey Ima says as he describes people’s attitudes toward boxing in his hometown in Uganda. Ima has been in the ring hundreds of times and came to love boxing so ...
Claude Regy says the team at the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) threw him the “best birthday party ever” when he arrived in Japan just days after the actual May 1 occasion. The 90-year-old French director is hoping for an even better birthday gift, ...
The 27-year-old defender says he was ready for a change of scenery after helping Sanfrecce Hiroshima win theJ. League title last season.
HONOLULU — Not every monarch is alike. It’s true that many are mean and greedy and full of themselves — selfish squirrels who sock their ill-gotten gains beneath everyone’s eyes overseas while they stick their political opponents into dark dank prisons — or graves. ...
LOS ANGELES — For much of the first few years of the new millennium, North Korea was viewed as the most probable nation-state aggressor in Asia. The holed-up communist regime had precious little to show for its decades in power, apart from its notorious ...
LOS ANGELES — Before too much time goes by, maybe somebody ought to take note of the smart political stuff coming out of Australia lately. The new prime minister there is off to some start. Elected last November, but actually in office only since ...
LOS ANGELES — Let’s not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Congressional grumblings about currency and balance-of-trade issues, and equal grumps from the U.S. Democratic Party’s leftwing (over human-rights issues), could leave the impression that U.S. policy toward China has been a dismal ...
LOS ANGELES — One of my all-time favorite Chinese proverbs goes like this: “To listen well is as powerful a means to influence as to talk well, and it is essential to all true conversations.” This ancient adage has often popped into my head ...
LOS ANGELES — Some double-standards are two-faced in the extreme, but not all. More and more members of the international commentariat (the cute word we use for the collective of appointed or self-appointed political pontificators around the world) are angry at China. Their claim ...
LOS ANGELES — Snow has been falling on two of the world’s greatest cities — lightly on Tokyo, brutally on Shanghai. Whether anything can or should be made of this comparative weather differential is questionable, of course. But suddenly it does seem a lot ...
LOS ANGELES — The current race for the White House might just prove to be a great clarifier on the Iraq war. This is undoubtedly the high-profile foreign-policy problem that the world would like our electoral system to resolve decisively. At the moment, the ...
LOS ANGELES — All political systems are peculiar, each in its own way. This is true of democracy, however defined, as well as of communist systems, more easily defined. A crowning example of the former has to be the Republic of Korea — better ...
LOS ANGELES — The Grand Asian Master, no more than a few thousand years old, appeared to me the other night (as he does from time to time) and asked what I wish for these days. North Korea: I told him that I dream ...
LOS ANGELES — A gift given to me years ago from Benazir Bhutto, an elegantly decorated wood jewelry box slathered in glossy lacquer, still adorns a sideboard in our home. The then-prime minister of Pakistan had wanted everyone in the room of visitors to ...
LOS ANGELES — It appears that many mainland Chinese moviegoers are traipsing over to Hong Kong in droves to view the uncensored version of Ang Lee’s latest blockbuster, “Lust, Caution.” With their feet, in effect, they are voting for lust — and as if ...