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August 27, 2025

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EDITORIALS

Jun 8, 2001

No answers in Nepal

The mountainous little Himalayan country of Nepal exploded into the headlines last week on the strength of an incident as bizarre, as mysterious -- and as bloody -- as the final scene of "Hamlet." On Friday, June 1, Nepal's King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev was shot to death along with his wife and seven...

EDITORIALS

Jun 7, 2001

Move ahead on postal privatization

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is a longtime advocate of postal-service privatization. This week his dream has taken a first step toward coming true. At its first meeting on Monday, the postal committee, an advisory panel to the prime minister, confirmed that the three postal services (mail, savings...

EDITORIALS

Jun 6, 2001

Will Koizumi play his trump card?

The idea of holding simultaneous elections for both Diet Houses persists among "not a few" Liberal Democrats. There is more than one reason for this. Despite the unprecedented popularity of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and his Cabinet, his Liberal Democratic Party does not enjoy equally high approval...

EDITORIALS

Jun 6, 2001

A fresh start for Peruvian politics

Peru's political drift ended with the victory of Mr. Alejandro Toledo in the runoff presidential election on Sunday. Mr. Toledo, an economist and the son of a poor mountain sheepherder, won 53 percent of the vote to defeat former president Alan Garcia who got 47 percent.

EDITORIALS

Jun 5, 2001

The brass tacks of reform

Over the past month or more, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has told the nation time and again that he is determined to fight forces opposed to change. Now he is coming to the point where he must show he means what he says. The immediate challenge is to flesh out his vision of "structural reform with...

EDITORIALS

Jun 4, 2001

Hope for Macedonia

As has so often been the case in the Balkans, a political minority is making big waves in Macedonia. For once, however, a government seems to be trying to accommodate that group rather than fanning the flames of discontent. Prodded by NATO and the European Union, the government in Skopje is trying to...

EDITORIALS

Jun 3, 2001

A candle that won't go out

Forty years ago, a British lawyer named Peter Benenson read in his morning paper about two Portuguese students who had been arrested in a Lisbon cafe and sentenced to seven years in prison for having drunk a toast "to freedom," a code phrase for opposition to the government of then dictator Antonio de...

EDITORIALS

Jun 2, 2001

NATO's Budapest love fest

It has been a good week for NATO. There was more common ground than disagreement at meetings between member foreign ministers in Budapest and at the five-day NATO Parliamentary Assembly, which convened in Vilnius, Lithuania. There were even tangible accomplishments on such thorny subjects as Turkey and...

EDITORIALS

Jun 1, 2001

Nagging doubts about nuclear energy

In a landmark referendum on Japan's nuclear-fuel recycling program, held last Sunday in Kariwa, Niigata Prefecture, a majority of village residents voted against a Tokyo Electric Power Co. project to use plutonium as reactor fuel at its nuclear-power plant there. The so-called pluthermal program, which...

EDITORIALS

May 31, 2001

Courage in South Asia

This week marks the third anniversary of Pakistan's nuclear tests. Those blasts followed India's own tests by a few days. Although both governments denied that the explosions posed a threat to regional peace and stability, the tit-for-tat exchanges marked a dangerous escalation in the situation in South...

EDITORIALS

May 30, 2001

Toward a basic law on human rights

The Council for Human Rights, an advisory panel to the justice minister, has submitted a report calling for the creation of an independent organization to provide relief for victims of discrimination, child abuse and other human-rights violations. The proposed body, tentatively called the "human-rights...

EDITORIALS

May 29, 2001

Dead end in the Middle East

The violence between Israelis and Palestinians continues to escalate. Every day there are new reports of atrocities; the cycle of attack and retaliation is intensifying, the time between them shortening. The only reason for hope in this grim situation is the -- belated -- recognition by the government...

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

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

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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