Jeff Kingston lives in Tokyo, teaches history at Temple University Japan and has been contributing to The Japan Times since 1988. “Contemporary Japan” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) is his most recent book.
For Jeff Kingston's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
A shoo-in a few months ago, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's plunge in popularity imperils his re-election to a third term as LDP president in September 2018, fueling speculation about when he will go and who will replace him. That said, it's still too soon ...
The nightmarish horrors of India's partition by the British 70 years ago on Aug. 15, 1947, cast a long shadow into the 21st century.
The public has seen the true face of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and doesn't like what it sees.
The costs of not improving the lot of nonregular workers are enormous in terms of thwarted careers, social status, poverty — and even isolation, as they have a much lower marriage rate.
The sudden implosion in Abe's popularity has significant consequences for his agenda of constitutional revision.
On July 16, 2007, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake rattled the world's largest nuclear power complex at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa — a site that the government and Tepco had insisted was seismically safe.
We have witnessed Abe's peak and he is now a diminished leader, with the aura of invincibility he projected since December 2012 now gone.
Japan's actions at Marco Polo Bridge, and its subsequent campaign to conquer China, unleashed a maelstrom that casts a long shadow over Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's efforts to turn the page on this history.
The irresistible urge to mix politics and religion usually comes at the expense of secularism, tolerance and vulnerable minorities. We saw this recently in Asia with extremist Islamic groups spewing anti-Chinese hate speech to defeat the incumbent governor of Jakarta, the ebbing tide of ...
Galagoda Atte Gnanasara is Sri Lanka's notorious rabble-rousing monk — leader of the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), a radical nationalist religious organization.
