A car bomb exploded outside a mosque Sunday, killing at least 37 people and wounding another 141 in a mostly Shiite Muslim neighborhood in the southern Pakistan city of Karachi — the third mass-casualty attack on the minority sect in the country this year. ...
It's a dangerous, unpredictable world. Twice in January Chinese warships in the East China Sea challenged Japan's Maritime Self Defense Forces patrols in a manner deemed threatening. And on Feb. 12 came North Korea's nuclear test.
Here's an open secret: Japanese men have a bad international reputation on the romance front.
SELLING WOMEN: Prostitution, Markets and the Household in Early Modern Japan, by Amy Stanley. University of California Press, 2012, 282 pp., $49.95 (hardcover) In the vast cultural landscape, Japan fascinates the mainstream with manga and anime, the martial arts, Zen and kimono. Of course, ...
Kenta Maeda shook off worries about his form with five shutout innings as Japan beat China 5-2 in first-round Pool A of the World Baseball Classic on Sunday at Fukuoka Dome. Japan improved to 2-0 following a tough win over Brazil in Saturday evening’s ...
For the fourth consecutive year, Japan’s land prices have fallen. Prices decreased an average 2.6 percent in 2011, but the decline was smaller than the 3.0 percent in 2010 as the economy bounced back from the 3/11 disasters. Commercial land prices slipped 3.1 percent ...
After decades of official neglect and mistrust, Turkey has taken several steps to ensure the rights of the country’s non-Muslim religious minorities, and thus guarantee that the rule of law is applied equally for all Turkish citizens, regardless of individuals’ religion, ethnicity or language. ...
Following the earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, and the subsequent nuclear crisis in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan’s manufacturing sector suffered greatly due to the damage caused to the nation’s supply chains. Attention should be paid to other sectors that are still reeling from ...
One of the main climate change concerns for Japan and other Asian countries with valuable and densely-populated low-lying coastal land is how much of their land may be threatened by rising sea levels and storm surges as the century advances. Humans burning fossil fuels ...
China’s meteoric rise to become the world’s second biggest economy and a global manufacturing center is sustained by ever-growing imports of raw materials and increasing investment abroad, often in under-developed countries shunned by the West for alleged human rights abuses or because they are ...
Can Muslim governments free themselves from their countries’ powerful militaries and establish civilian control comparable to that found in liberal democracies? This question is now paramount in countries as disparate as Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey. To predict how this struggle will play out, it ...
The world is in the midst of a boom in groundwater use. The rate of extraction from aquifers more than doubled in the 40 years to 2000. It has continued to soar since then. Professor Craig Simmons, who directs Australia’s National Center for Groundwater ...
In July 2009, China’s Foreign Ministry made a demand of the American embassy: Stop taking measurements of air pollution in Beijing available to ordinary Chinese since they conflicted with official data and could lead to “confusion” among the public and undesirable “social consequences.” The ...
Japan’s annual whaling season is currently under way with the inevitable lurid reports and tangled accusations. The history of conflict between Japan’s whaling boats and anti-whaling protesters has not only gained newspaper headlines, but has inspired its own TV program, “Whale Wars,” on the ...
Rising, warming and increasingly acidic seas threaten the very survival of Pacific island countries. The retreat of glaciers and snowfields in the Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau jeopardize these “water towers” on which 1 billion Asians depend for flows during the dry season and drought ...
Regarding the Nov. 30 Kyodo article “Japan to propose establishing body made up of whaling states“: How disappointing. So many Japanese are trying their best to make Japan appear as a nation that is aware of its actions. In this case, Japan is going ...
