Brad Glosserman - The Japan Times

LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA

Jan 12, 2000

Another megamerger, another Internet world-eating conglomerate emerges. Apart from its size, the AOL-Time/Warner deal is a big deal: The marriage of AOL and Time Warner matters (if it goes throtwo reasons. First, it combines one of the biggest Net presences with a broadband delivery systefinally makes real the prospect of a fat pipe in every home.

CULTURE / Books

Jan 10, 2000

How to level the business playing field

CRISIS AND OPPORTUNITY IN A CHANGING JAPAN, by William R. Farrell, with a foreward by Walter F. Mondale. Westport/London: Quorum Books, 1999, 275 pp., $60 (cloth). It's the Black Ships, round II. JETRO reports that foreign direct investment into Japan leaped 89.4 percent last year, topping $10 billion for the first time in history. Making those investments pay off is the next great challenge. Bill Farrell, a consultant and former executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan, offers indispensable assistance with "Crisis and Opportunity in a Changing Japan."

COMMENTARY / World

Jan 7, 2000

Pessimism, ambivalence about future sum up state of the nation

Staff writer

LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA

Dec 29, 1999

An open ethOS

The latest tale of cyber-riches involves the Linux crowd. A recent string of IPOs earned shareholders obscene amounts of money. Red Hat, a distributor of the Linux operating system, is worth about $15 billion. VA Linux, a company that sells computers that use Linux, made history: Its shares leaped 700 percent, making the company worth about $10 billion. Not bad for a firm with 153 employees, $17 million in sales and about $3.3 million in gross profits

LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA

Dec 15, 1999

Follow the money

Japan's back. After nearly a decade of economic stagnation, this country is getting its act together.

LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA

Dec 1, 1999

The top of the world

Tengboche Monastery is the oldest Buddhist monastery in Nepal. Founded in 1916 by Lama Gulu, the building itself has been destroyed and rebuilt twice. Today it is home to 50 monks and hosts about 22,000 visitors each year

LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA

Nov 10, 1999

A trans-Pacific e-channel

The name, us-style.com, hints at the focus: e-commerce with an American twist. The use of "US" suggests that the target audience considers place of origin important.

CULTURE / Books

Nov 10, 1999

Putting Japan on the psychologist's couch

POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY IN JAPAN: Behind the Nails That Sometimes Stick Out (and Get Hammered Down), edited by Ofer Feldman. Commack, N.Y.: Nova Science Publishers, 1999, 340 pp., (cloth). Political psychology is a tricky business. Plain old psychology is difficult enough, digging down as it does in the murky depths of the psyche and trying to make sense of everything buried there. Yet all that pales beside the idea of putting an entire nation on the couch. After all, how do you probe the mind of a collective, especially one as vast and various as a country?

LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA

Oct 27, 1999

Eyes on the storm

You don't have to be the wonky sort to want to keep tabs on what is going on in Northeast Asia. Yes, diplomacy can be tedious -- although North Korean rhetoric does liven things up a good bit -- but most Japan Times readers live in Japan and that puts them within range of those missiles ostensibly threatening the country. Those storms in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea blow uncomfortably close to home. Wanting to be informed doesn't seem like morbid curiosity to me; I'd call it healthy.

CULTURE / Books

Oct 19, 1999

Japan searches for status, finds only frustration

JAPAN'S QUEST FOR A PERMANENT SECURITY COUNCIL SEAT: A Matter of Pride or Justice?, by Reinhard Drifte. MacMillan Press, St. Antony's Series, 1999, 269 pp., 47.50 British pounds. From the day Japan surrendered to end World War II, its leaders have sought to rehabilitate the country and restore its prewar status as a leading power in the community of nations. Strategic alliance with the United States has been the chief means to that end.

LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA

Oct 13, 1999

Not just for kids anymore

I was never much of a video-game player, although I did have a brief infatuation with Missile Command. (It ended when a pal proceeded to stomp me every time we went head to head.) I must be one of the few: Video games are reckoned to be a $20 billion-a-year industry and revenues now outpace movie-ticket sales

CULTURE / Books

Sep 21, 1999

Get ready for the second nuclear age

FIRE IN THE EAST: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age, by Paul Bracken. HarperCollins, 1999, 186 pp., $25 (cloth). The last two years have upset a lot of strategic certainties. Rather than moving toward nuclear disarmament, the nuclear club has expanded as India and Pakistan exploded nuclear devices. Reportedly North Korea is waiting in the wings, and perhaps Iran, too, will join those elite ranks within a decade.

LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA

Sep 15, 1999

The family that surfs together ...

There is something mildly unsettling about the cyberpolice's fixation with child pornography. At the Internet Content Summit, held last week in Munich and hosted by the Bertelsmann Stiftung, kiddie porn was repeatedly denounced by participants. To judge from the general tone of the comments, it embodied the ultimate evolution of evil.

LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA

Sep 1, 1999

You are here?

The future is now. Or at least it was, two Sundays ago, in Japan. That was when computers in 24 satellites reached their built-in time limit and reset their internal clocks to zero.

LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA

Aug 18, 1999

Faster, faster, faster

The vast majority of people access the Internet through a telephone modem. Plug it in, turn on your machine and ... wait. And wait. And wait a little more. First, there is the search for the modem, then the connection, then the handshaking. Once you're online, you wait for the software to load, the right Web page to be found (when surfing), the page to download.

LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA

Aug 4, 1999

The usual suspects

Several months ago, I wrote about day trading and the thousands of investors who see it as the avenue to quick riches ("Easy money," Feb. 2). They use new technology to scamper through markets in ways that were impossible for ordinary citizens only a few years ago.

LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA

Jul 21, 1999

'A grotesque gap'

The United Nations Development Program's annual Human Development Report is usually a pretty grim document. Sure, life is improving for most people, but the poorest seem to get poorer and the gap between haves and have-nots is continually widening. The richest 20 percent of the world's population has 86 percent of world GDP; the bottom fifth has only 1 percent. The rising tide of globalization may lift all boats, but the numbers tell a different story. In 1960, the income gap between the world's richest fifth and poorest fifth was 30 to 1; in 1997, the spread had reached 74 to 1.

LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA

Jul 7, 1999

Technoborrrring

With rare exceptions, no one likes being called a Luddite. Steve Talbott, the thoughtful, somewhat skeptical philosopher who writes the Netfuture e-mail newsletter, for example, takes offense at being labeled "pessimistic." I thought it was a fair beef, but he devoted considerable space in his last missive to a defense of his position and denied that he was negative

LIFE / Digital / CYBERIA

Jun 30, 1999

Let's digital

Let's digital. That's the message in the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications 1999 White Paper on Communications in Japan. The annual survey, released earlier this month, reveals a nation poised for the millennium, its finger firmly on the mouse, clicking its way into the 21st century

CULTURE / Books

Jun 29, 1999

Meet Dr. Doom, Asia's most interesting analyst

RIDING THE MILLENNIAL STORM: Marc Faber's Path to Profit in the New Financial Markets, by Nury Vittachi. John Wiley & Sons, 1998, pp. 241, $29.95 (cloth). Great combination. Hyperkinetic Hong Kong scribe Nury Vittachi, author of 10 books and countless newspaper and magazine columns, and Marc Faber, "Dr. Doom," congenital contrarian, pundit and market analyst. Few writers could hope to capture the flash and flair of the pony-tailed, bar-hopping, history-minded investment adviser; Vittachi does the trick. (He also makes it clear that the two are pals; the cover notes this is an "authorized profile of the man and his ideas.")

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