More Commentary Articles - The Japan Times

November 05, 2025

Today's print edition

Subscribe for more access

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Jul 29, 2000

Play revives old debate over Nazi A-bomb

By Hiroaki Sato

"Absence of A-bomb: Were the Nazis duped -- or simply dumb?" So asks the weekly U.S. News & World Report in a piece for its July 24-31 cover story, "Mysteries of History." The question is being revisited now perhaps because of a recent Broadway import from London: Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen."

COMMENTARY

Jul 29, 2000

Putin the big winner at G8 summit

By Keizo Nabeshima

Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori and Russian President Vladimir Putin, both attending a summit of major industrial powers for the first time, played markedly different roles at the Group of Eight Okinawa summit that ended July 23.

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 29, 2000

Teaming up to make globalization work

By Kofi A. Annan

This week, at United Nations headquarters in New York, we have made a bit of history. Global leaders from the worlds of business, labor and civil society came together to forge a new coalition in support of universal values. Why is that necessary?

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 29, 2000

Foreigners are key to economic reform

By Naoyuki Haraoka

There are several indications that the Japanese economy is recovering from a serious depression. It seems that a large number of people share the opinion that structural reform is necessary to continue this recovery and put the economy on a steady and sustainable growth path.

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 28, 2000

Pessimists in the mist: Japanese still mired in crisis of confidence

By Brad Glosserman

It's hard to find a word that has so traumatized a generation as has "globalization." The term has become a convenient shorthand for all the uncertainties and unknowns of daily life, a catch-all for the problems that tug at economies and threaten to unravel traditional social structures.

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 28, 2000

Yasser Arafat draws the line

By David Hirst

BEIRUT -- At one fraught moment during Camp David, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak reportedly warned Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat: "If we don't finish the job now, at the next meeting I will no longer be prime minister." To which the Palestinian leader retorted: "If I give in on Jerusalem, I will...

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 27, 2000

A tale of two protests in Bangkok and Beijing

By Philip Cunningham

BANGKOK -- Last week, rural adherents of the Falun Gong movement in China surreptitiously made their way from provincial towns to stage short-lived protests in the heart of Beijing's Tiananmen Square. At the same time in rural Thailand, thousands of Thai peasants boarded trains for Bangkok to take an...

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM MOSCOW

Jul 27, 2000

Wily Putin seduces the world

By Constantine Pleshakov

Josef Stalin hated international travel: He suspected somebody might attempt to kill him. Nikita Khrushchev loved it: He enjoyed shocking foreign hosts with his erratic behavior. Leonid Brezhnev was happy to travel to any country that would give him a new Mercedes as a state gift. Mikhail Gorbachev had...

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 26, 2000

Russia gets back into the Korean fray

By John Barry Kotch

At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union re-established itself as a major player on the Korean Peninsula largely as a result of U.S. initiatives in dividing the country, for administrative convenience, between two zones of military occupation. In doing so, the Americans displayed great ignorance...

COMMENTARY

Jul 26, 2000

Ethics for a turbulent age

By Hugh Cortazzi

There is much justifiable concern in Japan and Britain about rising levels of crime and bad behavior, especially among young people. The responses have been varied, including the usual calls for heavier punishments combined with "zero tolerance" policing. Yet few have much idea how this is to be enforced...

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 26, 2000

Testing times for Sino-Pakistani friendship

By Farhan Bokhari

ISLAMABAD -- There was a familiar ring to recent allegations in U.S. newspapers, reportedly based on intelligence sources, that China is continuing to aid Pakistan's plans to build long-range nuclear-capable missiles. It is not the first time such allegations have surfaced in the United States, especially...

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 26, 2000

Swastikas under the onion domes

By Russell Working

VLADIVOSTOK, Russia It is a muggy Wednesday afternoon in the nation's largest Pacific seaport, and as people meander home, a handful of men and boys position themselves around the central square, an asphalt plaza decorated with a monument to the communist revolutionaries who conquered the Far East.

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Once smoky, male-dominated spaces, today's net cafes, like Kaikatsu Club, are working to make their operations more attractive to women customers.

The second life of Japan's net cafes

By Alex K.T. Martin

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Foreign wrestlers have a long history in sumo

Foreign wrestlers have a long history in sumo

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTS

SUPPLEMENTS BINDER

international-reports