National Topics

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After the bid, critics sound off on Olympics

by Philip Brasor

During the week following the announcement in Buenos Aires that Tokyo would host the 2020 Olympic Games, the Japanese media was saturated with news of the capital’s celebratory reaction. NHK, which will broadcast the Games, was particularly enthusiastic, leading every news report with a long Olympic-related item regardless of more ...

Sep 28, 2013

Popular @Horse_ebooks web comic loses its comedic engine

by Michael Cavna

Put enough monkeys in a room with a typewriter, the old theory goes, and they’ll eventually hunt-and-peck some Shakespeare. But on Tuesday, the wired world learned that a couple of conceptual-art bards had been masking themselves as the equivalent of gibbons, sending seemingly random ...

Travel shows warp true globalization

| Sep 14, 2013

Travel shows warp true globalization

by Philip Brasor

Now that Tokyo has been given the honor of hosting the 2020 Olympic Games, the city, as well as all of Japan, will spend the next seven years “internationalizing” (kokusai-ka), a term that becomes fashionable again every few years when something like this happens. ...

Sep 14, 2013

NY Times waves off Putin essay concerns

President Vladimir Putin won’t be getting a check from The New York Times as a “freelance journalist” but his controversial article on Syria was accepted for its newsworthy viewpoint. The newspaper’s public editor Margaret Sullivan said Thursday that the Russian leader’s editorial, submitted via ...

What's the real story behind 'Emperor'?

| Sep 7, 2013

What's the real story behind 'Emperor'?

by Mark Schreiber

“Emperor,” a film directed by Peter Webber that takes up the subject of Emperor Showa and the postwar occupation period, has been showing at local theaters since July. The film’s protagonist is Gen. Bonner Frank Fellers, who served as a subordinate to Supreme Commander ...

Media must take a stand against trolls

| Aug 31, 2013

Media must take a stand against trolls

by Philip Brasor

We live in an age of contention, when any comment can spark righteous indignation. Nominally conservative or progressive viewpoints become meaningless when every response is reactionary. This situation supposedly arose along with the Internet, which provides an unmediated outlet for every voice. Traditional media ...

| Aug 31, 2013

Married or single, Japan is a desolate country

by Michael Hoffman

“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 ...

To J.D. Salinger, new book would likely seem a hit below the belt

Aug 31, 2013

To J.D. Salinger, new book would likely seem a hit below the belt

by Jen Chaney

J.D. Salinger would hate this. He would hate that there’s a soon-to-be-released book called “Salinger” that’s positively thick with previously unreleased photos, interviews and correspondence designed to fling open the windows on, arguably, the most famous American recluse in history. He would hate that ...