16
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.
The thing that struck me about Tokyo Gov. Naoki Inose’s Muslim-slurring remarks (May 1 front-page article “Inose apologizes for slurring Muslims“) is his apparent clueless obliviousness. Of course, there’s nothing surprising in that because Japanese politicians seem to tend toward obliviousness. The more oblivious ...
Regarding the April 6 article “Can China’s new government end corruption?“: China’s corruption can be solved by simply taking a page from the United States and legalizing it. Politicians in the U.S. like to point their collective finger at China for corruption problems while ...
Barry Andrew Ward’s Catholic-bashing letter of May 9 … falsely portrays the Cathars as an innocent, wrongfully persecuted religious minority. In fact they held that the world was fundamentally evil, that suicide was admirable, that marital intercourse and reproduction were abhorrent, and other teachings ...
Unable to refute the key role of Christian principles in progressive advances, from abolition of slavery to workers’ rights, or the geographical congruence of human rights with the historic arc of Judeo-Christianity, Barry Ward (May 9 letter, “Worthy fight to right the church“) resorts ...
Frankly I was very sad and disappointed with what Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso had to say on the definition of “invasion” as well as their attitude toward invasion and colonization by Japan before 1945. Chinese and Koreans believe ...
In Joseph Jaworski’s May 9 letter, “Limits of planning good health,” he admits making the assumption linking a decrease in smoking to an increase in obesity. He then says I made an “unsupported assumption” that the decrease in smoking was from smokers dying and ...
Regarding the May 11 editorial “Preventing use of nuclear weapons“: Japan’s refusal to sign the international anti-nuclear weapons statement is completely reasonable and consistent with its current defensive policy. Japan should not seek to join [four NATO countries] Denmark, Iceland, Luxembourg and Norway in ...
Dipak Basu, in his May 2 letter, “Signs of ‘Christian’ Influence,” offers nothing to dispute the argument that the area of the world where human rights are most entrenched mirrors the historic orbit of Judeo-Christian influence. Not surprising: Freedom House’s “Freedom in the World ...
Regarding the May 8 front-page AFP article “N. Korea moves missiles from coast” and related stories: Is it better to rent or own? It’s an age-old debate and one where the White House has drawn a line in the sand right along the 38th ...
Chris Flynn (May 2 letter, “Australia’s declining smoking rate“) seems to believe I’m a shill for the local agricultural interests here in rural Kumamoto based on my opposition to tobacco restrictions. First, let me dissuade anyone of that opinion by saying Japan’s tariff regime ...
In her May 2 letter about the Yasukuni Shrine controversy, Brigitte Duchemin refers to the souls of the “Class-A war criminals” enshrined there. Why are these men considered war criminals when the Americans who planned and executed the firebombing of civilians in Tokyo and ...
The May 3 editorial “Japan’s approach to Myanmar” is timely and meaningful. It not only reflects the good will of The Japan Times toward the people of Myanmar but also provides a good grasp of the prevailing situation there. I only hope that the ...