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September 05, 2025

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COMMENTARY / World

Oct 22, 2002

North Korea's last gambit

By Victor D. Cha

WASHINGTON -- North Korea's surprise announcement of a secret nuclear-weapons program has thrown cold water on a recent warming of relations with South Korea and Japan that included family reunions, rejuvenated economic cooperation and, in particular, a stunning admission of past misdeeds against Japanese...

EDITORIALS

Oct 21, 2002

And now to work in South Asia

Pakistan and India have both held important elections in recent weeks. In Pakistan, the government party won as expected. In Kashmir, the pro-India party that has ruled the restive region for decades was routed. Even more important than the results is the fact that the votes were held at all. Now, both...

COMMENTARY / JAPAN IN THE GLOBAL ERA

Oct 21, 2002

Contributing to the spread of democracy

By Jean-pierre Lehmann

LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- In a recent editorial, the Financial Times admonished the European Union and its member states, "(for) having consistently failed to grasp the broad historic significance of the fall of the Berlin Wall nearly 13 years ago." It is in fact an awesome event, the significance of...

COMMENTARY

Oct 21, 2002

Keeping faith with the U.S.

By Keizo Nabeshima

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi plans to meet with U.S. President George W. Bush on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum to be held in Mexico later this month. Koizumi sets great store on Japan-U.S. friendship. In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in September,...

COMMENTARY

Oct 21, 2002

It's not what Bush says but how he says it

By Brad Glosserman

HONOLULU -- The controversy swirling around President George W. Bush's foreign policy is remarkable for two things. The first is the consensus regarding its content. Observers generally agree that the Bush foreign policy is muscular, unilateralist and dominated by political realists who practice power...

COMMENTARY / World

Oct 21, 2002

Problem calls for a 'concert of powers'

By Ahn Byung Joon

The stunning revelation that North Korea has a clandestine nuclear-weapons program casts a dark cloud over the future of a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula. It also dampens prospects for Japanese-North Korean normalization talks, not to mention the resumption of U.S.-North Korean dialogue.

COMMENTARY

Oct 21, 2002

Confessions from North Korea

By Ralph Cossa

SEOUL/PUSAN -- They say that a little bit of confession is good for the soul, but North Korea's sudden burst of religion is creating a moral dilemma for Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul. First, Pyongyang decides to come clean on the kidnapping of Japanese citizens, admitting to Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi...

EDITORIALS

Oct 20, 2002

All the news, period

Ever since news first met the Internet, informed observers have been predicting the death of print newspapers. When it didn't happen after people began retrieving their daily news with the help of Internet search engines, the sages said it would happen after the major newspapers launched their own online...

COMMENTARY / World

Oct 20, 2002

Peril of pre-emptive thinking

By Ramesh Thakur

NEW YORK -- Should Washington go to war unilaterally, it will put at risk the hard-earned reputation since 1945 of being an essentially peaceful hegemonist that fights only in self-defense -- unlike the former Soviet Union, the expansionist bully that dressed up its aggression in the rhetoric of a universal...

COMMENTARY / World / GUEST FORUM

Oct 20, 2002

Scarcity not to blame for pain of hunger

By Hisashi Uno

In 1945, the year the vicious war ended, there was famine in Italy, Russia, Bengal, Burma and much of China; and yet there were unsellable surpluses of food in the United States, Canada and some Latin American countries. Products could have been shipped, stored and sold in quantities large enough to...

EDITORIALS

Oct 19, 2002

Stunning news from North Korea

The world has puzzled over the significance of the almost complete news blackout that followed the visit of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly to North Korea earlier this month. Now we know the reason: North Korea admitted that it had a nuclear weapons development program, a violation of the...

COMMENTARY

Oct 19, 2002

Japan's tail-chasing economy

By Gregory Clark

With the economy still moribund after Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's initial round of "structural reforms," we are now told that cleaning up the banking system will save the day.

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

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Foreign wrestlers have a long history in sumo

Foreign wrestlers have a long history in sumo

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