Hiroaki Sato - The Japan Times

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Hiroaki Sato

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Hiroaki Sato

A Japan Times columnist since 2000, Hiroaki Sato has won prizes for his translation of poetry (PEN American Center, Japan-US Friendship Commission). A paperback edition of his "Legends of the Samurai" has recently appeared. He is now working on a second collection of samurai tales with their origins.

For Hiroaki Sato's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Sep 30, 2002

Great Tokyo Air Raid was a war crime

On Dec. 7, 1964, the Japanese government conferred the First Order of Merit with the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun upon Gen. Curtis LeMay -- yes, the same general who, less than 20 years earlier, had incinerated "well over half a million Japanese civilians, perhaps nearly a million."

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Sep 8, 2002

Judicial biases shape the American way

NEW YORK -- The first time I knew that Japan's Supreme Court was not really supreme but just another political arm of the state was when it ruled on the Sunagawa Incident. In December 1959, it reversed the Tokyo District Court's ruling that the Japan-U.S. Mutual Security Treaty was unconstitutional.

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Jul 29, 2002

Pursuit of mediocrity in textbook selection

NEW YORK -- Is the presence of 50,000 prostitutes "an important historical fact"? Grace Shore, chairwoman of the Texas State Board of Education, didn't think so, nor did the majority on her 15-member board.

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 9, 2002

Japan's close encounter with the West

'By reading, hearing, and by observation in foreign lands, our people have acquired a general knowledge of constitutions, habits and manners as they exist in most foreign countries. . . . Japan cannot claim originality as yet, but it will aim to exercise practical wisdom by adopting the advantages, and avoiding the errors, taught her by the history of those enlightened nations whose experience is her teacher."

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Jun 24, 2002

U.S. lessons Japan may prefer to skip

NEW YORK -- Americans love to learn and teach lessons. The Japanese love to seek and accept them.

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

May 27, 2002

Doing one's duty in a desperate situation

NEW YORK -- In April, when a young Palestinian woman blew herself up, killing and wounding many Israelis, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, "The president condemns this morning's homicide bombing."

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

May 2, 2002

The life and times of a Manchurian girl

NEW YORK -- The New York Times' recent reprinting of a cartoon showing Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat gagged and bound to a chair while Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon presses him to "say something! do something!" made me think of Rikoran, known today mainly as Yoshiko Yamaguchi.

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Mar 25, 2002

Lighthearted songs for the heaviest of times

NEW YORK -- My colleague Jeff passed on to me a writer's query posted on the Internet. As it happened, the inquiring writer was a novelist of whom I am a fan, and the subject on which he sought help was intriguing. He wanted to know about Japanese popular songs -- especially popular military songs -- in December 1941.

CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF

Mar 10, 2002

'Genji': the long and the shorter of it

The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Royall Tyler. Viking, 2001, 1,174 pp., $60 (cloth) In the February 2002 issue of the monthly journal Eureka, Fusae Kawazoe gives a rundown of translations of Murasaki Shikibu's "The Tale of Genji" -- not only into foreign languages, but into modern Japanese as well. In doing so, the noted Genji scholar reminds us of the profound influence of Arthur Waley's English translation, which was published in six installments from 1925 to 1933.

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Feb 25, 2002

Memoir sheds light on Chinese atrocity

NEW YORK -- My businessman friend Michio Hamaji, whose avowed mission is to improve international understanding, recently brought me a Japanese book titled "Charz." He told me it's a childhood memoir describing a Chinese atrocity in the late 1940s. If translated into English and published in the United States, he thought, it might counter whatever ill effects Iris Chang's book, "The Rape of Nanking" (1998), might have created in America. Without reading the memoir, I had to tell him that was unlikely.

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Jan 28, 2002

The plastic nature of historic judgment

NEW YORK -- There is something mesmerizing about America's fascination with its own people of prominence, especially presidents. There is an endless stream of biographies, and some become immensely popular.

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Dec 31, 2001

War recalls the savaging of Okinawa

NEW YORK -- Evidently prompted by the war in Afghanistan, John Gregory Dunne has discussed three books in The New York Review of Books (Dec. 20) to remind us of the savaging process that is war. For Dunne, whose sensitivity to anything false matches that of his wife, Joan Didion, who called "The Greatest Generation" -- the most fashionable historical branding in America today -- a "treacly concoction" and who described the "Boys of Pointe du Hoc" speech that Peggy Noonan wrote for Ronald Reagan for the 40th anniversary of Omaha Beach as "sentimental claptrap."

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Nov 26, 2001

Looking back on life in Stalinist Russia

NEW YORK -- My friend Lenore Parker threw a party for Mary M. Leder, who has just published her first book, at age 86. The book is an autobiography, "My Life in Stalinist Russia: An American Woman Looks Back" (Indiana University Press).

CULTURE / Books

Oct 21, 2001

Shaky bridges across the language gap

POESIE YAPONESIA: A Bilingual Anthology, edited by Taylor Mignon and Hillel Wright. Printed Matter Press, 2000, pp. 200, $20 (paper) For some reason, I had expected "Poesie Yaponesia" to be a collection of poems by longtime, English-speaking residents of Japan, each given in two versions, Japanese and English, both penned by the same poet. As it turned out, "Poesie Yaponesia" is not exactly that. An assemblage of pieces read in the "Power of the Spoken Word" series held in Tokyo from 1999 to 2000, most of the works are indeed poems, but the translations vary in ways that raise some interesting questions.

CULTURE / Books

Sep 23, 2001

Fact and fiction meet in re-creation of Ainu past

HARUKOR: An Ainu Woman's Tale, by Katsuichi Honda. Translated by Kyoko Selden. University of California Press, 2000, 315 pp., $19.95 (paper). When I was a university student in Kyoto during the 1960s, Katsuichi Honda was the most glamorous adventurer-journalist of the day.

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Aug 27, 2001

U.S. wants justice for all -- except itself

NEW YORK -- On Aug. 2, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia convicted Bosnian Serb Gen. Radislav Krstic of genocide. But even before the verdict, the Bush administration had made clear its opposition to the effort to create an International Criminal Court, which would broaden the scope of jurisdiction from specific to universal. As the July 13 New York Times dispatch from the United Nations put it, the Bush administration may even "work actively to reverse international support" for the court.

CULTURE / Books

Aug 5, 2001

From the outside looking in

THE DONALD RICHIE READER: 50 Years of Writing on Japan. Compiled, edited and with an introduction by Arturo Silva. Stone Bridge Press, 2001, 238 pp., $19.95 (paperback). Full disclosure: I've known Donald Richie for more than 20 years and, like many people who have known him for a long time, I count him among my good friends. Once, he helped me write a full-length book on the history of Japanese poetry out of a slim collection I had made of English translations of Basho's single haiku (yes, the one about an old pond and a frog). Another time, I committed an affront that would have prompted a different person to drop me. He simply waved it off with a smile. Richie is generous, considerate and tolerant.

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Jul 30, 2001

Is yellow journalism in vogue again?

Why do so many foreign commentators feel they can get away with anything they say about Japan?

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Jun 25, 2001

Debunking America's 'Good War' myth

The movie "Pearl Harbor" may be copying what happened after Japan's actual assault: a spectacular initial success followed by a string of disappointments. But since I'm invoking history, I must hasten to add that there won't be anything remotely resembling an unconditional surrender in store for the Hollywood venture.

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

May 28, 2001

Progress made in how Japan sees Korea

The latest instance of textbook controversy has reminded me of the changing descriptions in the entry on Korea in different editions of a well-known Japanese-language dictionary. Reports have it that the South Korean government was so upset by a certain textbook that its protests brought on a diplomatic crisis.

From easily navigable train stations to the helpfulness of its municipal staff, Tokyo has earned high praise for its commitment to accessibility for disabled travelers.

[Rebroadcast] Japan is doing better on accessibility than you may think

When trying to trace your lineage in Japan, the "koseki" is the most important form of document you'll encounter.

Climbing the branches of a Japanese family tree

By Alex K.T. Martin

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