Issues

Last year, the government passed a law covering minpaku, which is when people rent out space on their properties to travelers (a la Airbnb). The law is part of an effort to regulate accommodations amid a tourism boom ahead of the 2020 Olympics. One issue ...

The closure of 51 Coco Juku eikaiwa (English conversation) schools in Japan last week, with more to come in June, illustrates just how unstable the English teaching market can be. Companies that used to provide fairly well-paying jobs are now, in many cases, restructuring ...

Dennis Tesolat is chair of the General Union based in Osaka. Founded in 1991, the organization is part of a national private sector trade union known as Zenkoku-Ippan (the National Union of General Workers), which belongs to a confederation known as Zenrokyo (National Trade ...

When you move to a new city, it can be hard to find your crowd. That task is made even harder the more complex your identity is. The population of the greater Tokyo area is approaching 40 million and while it is possible to make ...

With Emperor Akihito abdicating on April 30, the Heisei Era that began Jan. 8, 1989, after his father's death will also come to an end. With this column I'd like to look back at some of the noteworthy changes that occurred to Japan's laws ...

When Angela Ortiz describes what it felt like to return to Aomori Prefecture five days after the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, she uses words like "horror," "incredulous disbelief" and "intense curiosity." The 36-year-old American lived in Aomori between the ages of ...

Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" are fictional rules, so why do we keep looking to them for guidance? The closest thing to real-world robot law we could have more seems likely to develop around the question of when autonomous military drones can make "kill" ...

At no point have I ever had to grapple with the decision to have my genitals surgically removed. Perhaps the same is true for you. While these may seem an odd set of affirmations to open with, they help illustrate a basic truth: How ...

Every January, Just Be Cause takes a look at how things went for the non-Japanese residents of Japan (NJ) in the previous year. While not everything made this year's list — there were the false claims of "foreigner fraud" of the national health insurance system, ...