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A sit-in by visa violators and their families entered its second day Tuesday in front of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau with protesters seeking government good will. The action at the bureau in Minato Ward is being organized by the Asian People’s Friendship Society, ...
Kazuhiro Shiraishi, 66, is a guest-house manager in the Izu-kogen Highlands, a famous resort area on the Izu Peninsula of Shizuoka Prefecture. Looking out onto the Pacific Ocean, and just 90 minutes by train from Tokyo, Izu has a warm climate all year round ...
“I was stopped by two men in a government-registered vehicle, blindfolded and dragged off the street. They took me away to a house in a place I did not know. I was forced into a room with blood all over the walls and floor, ...
Takashi Miike's blood-soaked vengeance tale, one of two Japanese films being shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, draws the biggest boos so far, with critics savaging it as overacted and cliched.
Have you ever given your best effort while striving to achieve something but felt like what you were doing was futile? That’s the feeling I’m getting about Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Olympics. With just over three months to go until the IOC ...
Two mind-sets seem to be catching on in Japan these days. They worry me. One is the notion that something has to be useful to be of value. The other is that anything is justifiable on the grounds that everybody else is doing it. ...
The House of Councilors election will be held within three months, and the focus is on whether the split in the Diet — where the two chambers of the legislature are controlled by different camps — will finally be mended. The radical changes in ...
As I observe Team Abe in action at the helm of the Bank of Japan and elsewhere, a rather terrifying passage from a poem by William Hughes Mearns comes to mind: “Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t ...
The Bank of Japan on Wednesday installed a new governor and two deputy governors who — in line with the wishes of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — are advocates of ultra-easy monetary policy. Attention is now focused on what specific policy actions the new ...
A new executive team is about to take office at the Bank of Japan, but at least two of the incoming members will be wearing hats somewhat different than those doffed by employees of the central bank: The initials on their head gear will ...
T he government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the Bank of Japan agreed last week to set a 2 percent inflation target to be achieved “as soon as possible.” All sorts of issues have been raised, from the dangers of intervening in monetary ...
Japan is about to get a new government and it’s just like old times. Liberal Democratic Party leader Shinzo Abe, who is set to become prime minister, again sounds as if he has been spending his time out of office back in the 1960s. ...
Needless to say, the biggest challenge for the government to be formed after Sunday’s general election is to put the Japanese economy on a growth path. Many people repeat the mantra of pulling Japan “out of deflation and the strong yen,” but the first ...
We live in the global age. We have been living in it for quite some time now. It is some 20 years, give or take, since the word “global” began to establish itself in the economic lexicon. A friend one has known for that ...
The demand and supply balance is adjusted through price fluctuations under a market economy. However, price changes often go too far, occasionally leading to creation of a bubble boom and its subsequent collapse. When Japan’s bubble boom went bust in the early 1990s, Japanese ...
Japan is having trouble keeping up a cordial relationship with its next door neighbors. Long dormant territorial disputes have suddenly come to the fore. Who owns what from when and why? Who can claim legal ownership? Who is in actual control? Arcane issues have ...
The number of people in Japan aged 65 or older has reached 30.74 million, or 24.1 percent of the population, according to a government estimate released on the Respect for the Aged Day last Monday. The numbers are record highs and warn of snowballing ...