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 Shaun O'Dwyer

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Shaun O'Dwyer
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / FOREIGN AGENDA
Sep 20, 2017
Japan doesn't need to criminalize hate speech
Considering constitutional issues and the risk of creating 'martyrs,' the current law strikes the right balance.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / LEARNING CURVE
Jul 12, 2017
For East Asian students, 'Confucius made me do it' is no excuse
To understand why some students in Japan, China and Korea plagiarize or don't speak out, it's worth looking at their modern education systems.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Mar 19, 2017
What's so bad about Imperial Rescript on Education anyway?
The 19th century rescript caught up in the Moritomo Gakuen scandal is not just a collection of homely moral precepts.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE FOREIGN ELEMENT
May 1, 2016
Foreign volunteers helping to rebuild lives in Kumamoto
The truth is, as many volunteers are needed as can help the many homeowners who want possessions recovered from destroyed homes, or who need trash and heavy broken appliances pulled out of their otherwise intact dwellings.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Apr 5, 2016
Preserving Okawa Elementary School is the right thing to do
All things considered, it makes sense to preserve Okawa Elementary School as a memorial, as a warning and as a site for disaster education.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / FOREIGN AGENDA
Mar 6, 2016
Immigration: the missing piece in the Tohoku recovery puzzle?
Entrepreneurship, reconstruction and tourism still may not be enough to save rapidly depopulating Onagawa.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Aug 4, 2015
Of kimono and cultural appropriation
Clueless identity politics activists in the U.S. are no friends of Japan's struggling kimono industry.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues
Jul 29, 2015
A Chinese front opens in the battle over Taiji's dolphin drive hunts
There was much media coverage in April of the decision by the World Association for Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA) to suspend its Japanese affiliate, JAZA, because of concerns over animal cruelty due to the sourcing of captive dolphins from the infamous drive hunts in Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / FOREIGN AGENDA
Mar 16, 2015
Japanese activists fight against the tide to save whales and dolphins
Homegrown foes of dolphin hunts and 'research whaling' face off against a daunting array of powerful interests.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Dec 7, 2014
Remembrance that stifles
Victim and revisionist nationalisms about the past in East Asia block the way to greater regional integration.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE FOREIGN ELEMENT
Sep 22, 2014
Kaikoura and Taiji: a tale of two whaling towns
The success of a New Zealand whale-watching eco-tourist destination could hold lessons for the ailing Wakayama port tarred by association with the 'Cove' dolphin hunt.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Aug 18, 2014
A rational conversation on whaling
On both sides of the Japanese whaling debate, there is a pressing need for critical reflection on the logic used and the realities presumed.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 3, 2014
The Tank Man's defiance
Chinese Communist authorities largely spared the student protesters of Tiananmen Square 25 years ago, though many leaders went to prison. It was ordinary citizens like the famous man who stood down the tank — along the streets to the square — who suffered the most.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Apr 25, 2014
Japan scores whaling own goal
In the hindsight of the recent International Court of Justice's humiliating ruling against Japan's Antarctic scientific whaling, the government's slapping down of Japan Greenpeace in 2010 was probably a bad idea.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Feb 2, 2014
Cooling down the history wars
To protect the integrity of history teaching, historians and teachers should insist, forcefully, that there are many spaces where patriotism can be cultivated in a modern democratic society but that the history classroom is not one of them.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE FOREIGN ELEMENT
Dec 9, 2013
Korean volunteers put the K into kizuna
One volunteer group, based at Tokyo's Meiji University, is called Kizuna International; the other, at Kyoto University, is Kizuna From Kyoto. The coincidences do not end there: Both groups' leaders share the same surname and both are ethnic Koreans.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Nov 14, 2013
Echoes of an old debate on feminism and individualism
A century ago 'individualism' was a byword for Japan's reforming intelligentsia. To the extent that it served the goals of modernizing the Japanese state, it was acceptable.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Voices / FOREIGN AGENDA
Oct 30, 2013
Volunteers staying the course in Tohoku
Upstart NGOs It's Not Just Mud and OGA for Aid continue to punch above their weight in public conversations about the future of Tohoku.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Jul 30, 2013
It's time for conservatives of Japan to get over the war
If conservatives renounced revisionist nationalism in favor of their inherited democracy, many outside of Japan could live with a more powerfully armed Japan.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Apr 10, 2013
A Japanese poet's whale elegy
If some Japanese advocates of whale hunting could commune with their ancestors, they'd feel the past dismay at the impious waste of whales' lives.

Longform

Dul Saroth (left) and Soeum Samrach, deminers with the Cambodian Mine Action and Victim Assistance Authority, practice using the Advanced Landmine Imaging System in Cambodia’s Siem Reap province in August.
The Japanese tech that could one day make Southeast Asia landmine-free