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August 23, 2025
 

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EDITORIALS
Dec 29, 2011
Unprepared for what happened
A third-party panel set up by the government to investigate the accidents at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant issued Monday an interim report based on interviews with 456 people. It emerges from the report that before the March 11 disaster both Tepco and the government had...
EDITORIALS
Dec 28, 2011
Budget with record-high spending
The Noda Cabinet on Saturday endorsed the fiscal 2012 budget to be submitted to the Diet. The general account spending will drop 2.2 percent from the fiscal 2011 initial budget to ¥90.33 trillion — the first fall in six years.
EDITORIALS
Dec 28, 2011
Mr. Noda's Beijing summit
Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda visited Beijing on Sunday and Monday for the first time as prime minister and met with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao. It was the first Japanese prime minister's official visit to China since the Democratic Party of Japan came to power.
EDITORIALS
Dec 27, 2011
And now the real test for Iraq
The longest and most contentious war in U.S. history ended this month with T.S Eliot's proverbial whimper. A dictator was removed, a regime transformed, democracy imposed. While the soldiers celebrated their departure, the response in the United States was muted. A conflict that started with "shock and...
EDITORIALS
Dec 26, 2011
Digging up Olympus' coverup
The special investigation squad of the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office on Dec. 21 raided the head office of Olympus Corp., the home of its former president and chairman Tsuyoshi Kikukawa and the offices of three firms that Olympus purchased, in connection with the major camera and endoscope...
EDITORIALS
Dec 26, 2011
Absurd arrest rectified
Mr. Isamu Kaneko, a then Tokyo University researcher, developed the peer-to-peer file-sharing software Winny, and was arrested in May 2004 on suspicion of assisting with copyright violations.
EDITORIALS
Dec 25, 2011
The earthquake year
The year of the earthquake and tsunami is how 2011 will be remembered in Japan. No bounen-kai (forget-the-year party) has passed without thoughts of those who lost so much in the triple earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster on or after March 11. The powerful 9.0-magnitude earthquake devastated the northeast...
EDITORIALS
Dec 24, 2011
Vaclav Havel, eternal dissident
The death of North Korea's supreme leader, Kim Jong Il, has obscured the passing of a truly heroic figure: Vaclav Havel. The Czech writer and dissident who became his country's first postcommunist president died Dec. 18. Mr. Havel was Mr. Kim's worst nightmare — an incorrigible and irrepressible dissenter,...
EDITORIALS
Dec 23, 2011
Risky catalog purchase of fighter
The government on Tuesday selected Lockheed Martin's F-35 as the Air-Self Defense Force's next-generation fighter over Boeing's F/A-18 and the Eurofighter Typhoon to replace aging F-4 fighters. Japan plans to purchase 42 F-35s, hoping that the first delivery will start in fiscal 2016 (April 2016-March...
EDITORIALS
Dec 23, 2011
Conflict over child allowance
As the central government's work to compile the fiscal 2012 budget goes into full swing, conflicts between the central and local governments are deepening over the use and distribution of funds. One such conflict is over funding of the monthly child allowance. Children younger than 3 each will be entitled...
EDITORIALS
Dec 22, 2011
Water, water, everywhere ...
It is estimated that some 60 million people depend on the 4,900-km-long Mekong River and its tributaries for their lives and livelihoods — food, water and transportation. It is the world's largest inland fishery; an estimated 1,000 species of fish live in the Mekong, making it the second-most biodiverse...
EDITORIALS
Dec 21, 2011
Sex-slave issue rekindled
In a summit in Kyoto on Sunday with Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, South Korean President Lee Myung Bak unexpectedly made a specific comment on the issue of Korean women who were forced to provide sex to members of the Imperial Japanese armed forces during the war years.
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.
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.
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.
Demystifying the manufacturing success of China
China’s massive scale, strong education system and competitive local governance have enabled it to reach the technological frontier and dominate high-tech manufacturing despite its low per capita gross domestic product.
Infectious diseases to watch for in Japan this summer amid surge of cases
An illustration of a colony of the Bordetella pertussis bacterium that causes pertussis, or whooping cough. As of Aug. 10, there were 64,467 cases reported this year, according to the latest data from the Japan Institute for Health Security.
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
Tokyo crowned No.1 'workation' spot
Workations were a burgeoning trend in the corporate world for years before the COVID-19 pandemic turbocharged it.

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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