Modern middle-class life, you could reasonably argue, generates more happiness among more people than any other ever conceived. It has been extravagantly derided — as bourgeois, soulless, spiritless, narrow, boring, mindlessly acquisitive and so on. But back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, ...

A mind like Shoeki Ando — bold, mischievous, unconventional, borderline crackpot, one might almost say — is worth probing, if only for those qualities, let alone for his ideas, which leave the mainstream so far behind that the word "evil" has been attached to ...

While school rucksacks in Japan may be getting heavier, the prospects for the over-educated may be getting bleaker.

Nine years after then-U.S President Barack Obama committed America to the pursuit of "a world without nuclear weapons," nine months after the U.N. adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and five months after the Nobel Peace Prize Committee conferred one of ...

Has ever a civilized people lived in greater intimacy with death than the Japanese?

"We're all terrified. It's like living in a mass grave." It's an underground shelter. "No water, no food, no ventilation, no toilets. Explosion after explosion. It never stops." The civil war in Syria grinds on. Noncombatants are powerless, helpless, living as if dead, if not ...

Humanity is turning a corner. The signpost is marked "AI." Everyone knows what it stands for. Who knows what it means? We know what it's beginning to look like. "Futuristic" is a word that springs to mind. "Presentistic" would be better, but the dictionary fails ...

Every age breeds its own morality. One era's good is another's evil. Today's virtue is tomorrow's vice, today's wisdom tomorrow's stupidity, today's sanity tomorrow's madness. For 700 years, from the late 12th to the mid-19th centuries, Japan's highest ideals were embodied in the samurai. Unflinching ...

Freedom comes in many forms, as does "unfreedom." You can be a prisoner in prison, a prisoner in a prison-state, a prisoner in your job, a prisoner in your joblessness. Who is freer — a poor person in a free country, or a rich ...

The fate of the world hangs on two volatile characters of doubtful sanity. "I went from VERY successful businessman, to T.V. Star, to President of the United States (on my first try)," Donald Trump tweeted earlier this month. "I think that would qualify as not ...