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August 24, 2025
 

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COMMENTARY / World
Mar 24, 2010
Don't just wait for disaster
By Ban Ki Moon and Ban Ki-moon
NEW YORK — No country can afford to ignore the lessons of the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti. We cannot stop such disasters from happening. But we can dramatically reduce their impact, if the right disaster risk reduction measures are taken in advance.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 24, 2010
Catalyzing consumption and balancing growth
By Anoop Singh
WASHINGTON — China has weathered the great recession well. The world now waits to see if last year's impressive domestic demand growth can be sustained, and if China can, in the words of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, "give full play to the leading role of consumer demand in driving economic growth."
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 23, 2010
Political meddling hurts corporate value
By Lucian Bebchuk
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down limits on the freedom of companies to spend money on political elections. Large, publicly traded companies in other countries also often have a loose rein on their use of corporate resources to influence political outcomes, fueling fears...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 23, 2010
Former POW rejects idea that DPJ is anti-American
By Lester Tenney
CARLSBAD, Calif. — As a survivor of Imperial Japan's infamous prisoner-of-war camps, forced labor at a Mitsui coal mine in Fukuoka and the horrors of the Bataan Death March in the Philippines, I know anti-Americanism when I see it. Some say the ruling Democratic Party of Japan is anti-American. I know...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 23, 2010
Redressing incentives for executives to fail
By Lucian Bebchuk, Alma Cohen and Holger Spamann
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In a report just filed with the U.S. court that is overseeing the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, a court-appointed examiner described how Lehman's executives made deliberate decisions to pursue an aggressive investment strategy, take on greater risks and substantially increase leverage....
COMMENTARY / World / SENTAKU MAGAZINE
Mar 22, 2010
A haphazard approach to making foreign policy
"I wonder to what extent the Hatoyama administration relies on bureaucrats for its foreign policy," a diplomat from a Middle Eastern country said recently. "It has not expressed its own messages on issues such as Iran's nuclear weapons programs and the Mideast peace process. That makes me wonder who...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 21, 2010
Trial by crisis for future growth
By Leszek Balcerowicz
WARSAW — Episodes like the current financial crisis seriously disrupt economic growth. But the question that we should be asking concerns such episodes' impact on longer-term development. And that question has attracted surprisingly little interest.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 21, 2010
Let 'occupation tax' make the settlers pay
By Ezzedine Choukri Fishere
CAIRO — Arab intellectuals and policymakers have often accused Europe of using financial generosity to cover up its political impotence over the Arab-Israeli conflict. If Europe is to be taken seriously as a global player, they argue, it must also flex some muscle when it delivers the money.
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Mar 21, 2010
Who ever could make war if they saw it through children's eyes?
By Roger Pulvers
The misery of war remains for many long years as scar tissue in the minds of children deeply traumatized by it. And yet, there are not many works of fiction or nonfiction that have conveyed the confusion and pain felt by such children.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 20, 2010
Let the clean water flow
By Caroline Boin
LONDON — The 18th annual World Water Day (March 22) offers the same old problems and rejects the practical solutions. On Monday, 1 billion people will, as usual, spend the day without clean water and a third of humanity without adequate sanitation. As usual, some 3.5 million men, women and children...
COMMENTARY
Mar 19, 2010
Revising the art of defense
By David Howell
LONDON — How much should a nation spend on defense and its armed forces?
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 18, 2010
Afghanistan lost without better governance
By Jamie F. Metzl
NEW YORK — The United States and its Afghan and NATO allies have demonstrated unmistakable progress in Afghanistan this year. The ongoing Marjah campaign, the arrest of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and two Taliban "shadow governors" in Pakistan, and the recent drone strike hitting top leaders of the...
Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years
The Agency for Cultural Affairs is recommending replacing the government’s long-standing Kunrei system with more widely used Hepburn-style spellings.
Women-only communities flourish in China
Chen Yani (right), nicknamed "Keke," eats lunch with friends and guests in a female co-living space she founded called "Keke's Imaginative Space" in Hangzhou, in eastern China's Zhejiang province, on July 14.
JR East cancels luxury train run over crew's boozing
East Japan Railway said Thursday that it will cancel one trip of a luxury overnight sleeper service, which was originally scheduled to depart from Ueno Station in Tokyo on Aug. 30, after crew members were found to have been drinking alcohol on duty.
Man arrested over deadly stabbing of woman in Kobe
Masashi Tanimoto, 35, the suspect in the deadly stabbing a 24-year-old woman, is taken into custody in Kobe on Friday night.
Japanese city proposes two-hour daily limit for smartphone use
The Toyoake Municipal Government in Aichi Prefecture is planning to enact an ordinance to urge all smartphone users in the city to limit screen time to two hours a day outside work or school.
Alicia Keys closed Summer Sonic, but J-pop owned it
Summer Sonic’s 2025 lineup demonstrated its strength, showcasing the latest in J-pop, including “new kawaii” act Fruits Zipper.
Is the LDP’s catch-all approach to politics still effective?
Former economic security minister Sanae Takaichi visits Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on Aug. 15. Political commentator Toru Hashimoto has suggested that Takaichi ought to lead a group of like-minded hawkish politicians out of the Liberal Democratic Party and form their own party.
Fingers sore from too much phone time? You might have ‘sumaho yubi.’
A catch-all term for tendonitis and arthritis caused by excessive smartphone use, 'sumaho yubi' may be difficult to treat for gadget-crazy Japan.
As farm minister, Koizumi is held ‘hostage’ by Ishiba
Farm minister Shinjiro Koizumi (center) attends a Lower House session on Aug. 1. Locking Koizumi into the Cabinet is Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s way of turning a potential rival into a team player, according to one expert.
Big burgers and bigger ambitions for Japan's Burger King
Kazuhiro Nomura, president of BK Japan Holdings, which operates Burger King in Japan

Podcast

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.
Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Longform

Tetsuzo Shiraishi, speaking at The Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage, uses a thermos to explain how he experienced the U.S. firebombing of March 1945, when he was just 7 years old.
From ashes to high-rises: A survivor’s account of Tokyo’s postwar past
By Alex K.T. Martin

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