Politics & Diplomacy
Hashimoto to retract sex suggestion for U.S. military
Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto aims to retract his remark that U.S. servicemen in Okinawa should use the local adult entertainment industry to avoid committing sex crimes.
Commentary | THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK Feb 25, 2008
Is ethnic passing finally becoming passe?
by Hiroaki Sato
NEW YORK — Just about the time Bliss Broyard’s book “One Drop” came out last year, I received the latest book from my prolific friend Inuhiko Yomota, “Japan’s Marrano Literature.” In her book, Broyard deals with “racial passing” — a detailed exploration of why ...
Commentary | THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK Jan 28, 2008
Watching the world's biggest roadshow
by Hiroaki Sato
NEW YORK — I was recently amused to read the following observation quoted in an intellectual history of modern Japan: “The system in which people vie to get elected head of state through indulgence in garrulity and by flaunting gestures like those of low-class ...
Commentary | THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK Jan 8, 2008
Bottle of water delivers wrong message
by Hiroaki Sato
NEW YORK — “You really have to wonder at the utter stupidity and the irresponsibility sometimes of American consumers,” Salt Lake City Mayor Ross “Rocky” Anderson said. “These false needs are provided, and too often we just fall in line with what Madison Avenue ...
Commentary | THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK Nov 26, 2007
Plenty wrong with U.S. agricultural policy
by Hiroaki Sato
NEW YORK — The U.S. farm bill — a blanket term for all measures related to agriculture, some barely so — appears doomed this year. The House version passed at the end of July, but the Senate version has been stalled in such a ...
Commentary | THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK Oct 29, 2007
Fatal deliverance from an 'iron storm'
by Hiroaki Sato
NEW YORK — I was thinking once again about the intractability of Japan’s part in the Pacific phase of World War II when the news came: Okinawans had staged a huge rally to protest the Japanese government’s downplaying in textbooks the military’s role in ...
Commentary | THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK Sep 24, 2007
The Self-Defense Forces: living with a lie
by Hiroaki Sato
NEW YORK — Many commentators have invoked historical analogies for U.S. President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and its still unfolding aftermath, with some saying, correctly, that no exact historical analogies are possible for anything, the least of all this damnable war. Still, ...
Commentary | THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK Aug 20, 2007
Why can't Americans give up their guns?
by Hiroaki Sato
NEW YORK — Is there anything comparable to the numbing obstinacy, the utter blindness to reality, that politicians display toward the consequences of untrammeled gun ownership in this country? So I wondered, once again, when I stumbled upon President George W. Bush’s answer to ...
Commentary | THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK Jul 30, 2007
How a woman portrayed Hitler as human
by Hiroaki Sato
NEW YORK — What kind of courage, or audacity even, is required to stage, in Washington, a play featuring Adolf Hitler — one provocatively titled “My Friend Hitler” and written no less than by Yukio Mishima? After all, not just Hitler, but anything associated ...
Commentary | THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK Jun 25, 2007
Haiku appreciation at the United Nations
by Hiroaki Sato
NEW YORK — This month I was judge of the Japanese division of the haiku contest sponsored by the United Nations International School (UNIS). John Stevenson, editor of Frogpond, the magazine of the Haiku Society of America, judged the haiku written in English. I ...
Commentary | THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK May 28, 2007
Rooting out the purplish, yellow perils
by Hiroaki Sato
NEW YORK — A certain plant of the pea family has been appreciated in Japan — poetically, dietarily and medicinally — since ancient times. So, in the oldest extant anthology of Japanese poetry, the “Man’yoshu,” it is used as an epithet for “without interruption,” ...
Commentary | THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK Apr 30, 2007
Tobacco's road from fashion to filth
by Hiroaki Sato
NEW YORK — If a recent article in the Science section of The New York Times is any indication, the idea that the history of the tobacco industry in the United States has been nothing less than perfidy has taken hold among the socially ...
Commentary | THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK Mar 26, 2007
Jury system doesn't guarantee justice
by Hiroaki Sato
NEW YORK — My U.S.-Japanese business consultant friend John Gillespie dropped by and, upon hearing that my wife Nancy had been summoned to jury duty, said Japan should introduce a similar system. At the time, the Lewis “Scooter” Libby case — about whether the ...