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July 20, 2025
 

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COMMENTARY
Apr 25, 2009
Pakistan's terrorist windfall
By Brahma Chellaney
Pakistan has long proven adept at diplomatically levering its weakness into strength. Now it is using the threat of its possible implosion to rake in record-level bilateral and multilateral aid.
EDITORIALS
Apr 25, 2009
Tent villages highlight shortfalls
The establishment of a tent village in Tokyo's Hibiya Park during the New Year's holidays to help unemployed temporary workers is a sobering reflection of these hard times. In the tent village, nonprofit organization and labor union activists gave advice on a variety of matters ranging from finding employment...
EDITORIALS
Apr 24, 2009
Tokyo by-law threatens freedoms
Street performances are fun for many people and give character to streets and communities such as Tokyo's Shibuya, Harajuku, Akihabara and Kichijoji areas. But now such activities may be restricted or banned due to a revision of the Tokyo metropolitan by-law for "the building of safe and secure communities,"...
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 24, 2009
New revolt of the masses
By Dominique Moisi
PARIS — Is the current economic crisis uniting the democratic world in anger as much as in fear? In France, with many factories closing, a wave of executive hostage-taking — "boss-napping," as this newfangled crime is called — is agitating board rooms and police. In the United States, big bonuses...
EDITORIALS
Apr 23, 2009
Resignation not enough
Mr. Noboru Okubo and his eldest son have resigned respectively as chief director and vice director of the Kyoto-based Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation over irregularities related to its operations, including the accumulation of unusually large profits for a public-interest corporation and opaque...
EDITORIALS
Apr 23, 2009
A complicated trial
The Third Petty Bench of the Supreme Court, in a 5-0 decision Tuesday, upheld lower court rulings that sentenced a Wakayama woman to death for killing four people and poisoning 63 others by lacing a curry stew with arsenic during a community summer festival in July 1998. This was a difficult and unusual...
COMMENTARY
Apr 23, 2009
U.S. shifting Mideast policy
By David Howell
It is almost possible to hear the tectonic plates grinding. The whole international landscape is once again on the move, tumbling old structures and turning old assumptions upside-down.
COMMENTARY
Apr 23, 2009
No place for doctors who torture
By Cesar Chelala
Physicians and other medical personnel were involved in the abusive interrogation of terrorists suspects held overseas by the CIA, according to a secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The report was obtained by journalist Mark Danner, who has written extensively about...
EDITORIALS
Apr 22, 2009
A boost for consumer rights
A government agency to promote consumer rights, a pet idea of former Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, is likely to be established this fall at the earliest. The Lower House's plenary session on Friday unanimously passed related bills, products of compromise between the ruling and opposition parties. The...
EDITORIALS
Apr 22, 2009
Fixing social safety nets
Prime Minister Taro Aso has established a panel to discuss social security and state finance from a middle- and long-range viewpoint. The panel, described as a "conference to build a society in which people will have a sense of economic security," has held its first meeting in which it confirmed that...
COMMENTARY
Apr 22, 2009
Nuclear disarmament: too much, too soon?
By Ralph Cossa
There is no country on Earth more committed to global nuclear disarmament than Japan. Ever since experiencing firsthand the horrors of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese government and people have been steadfast in calling for the total elimination of nuclear weapons from the planet....
COMMENTARY
Apr 22, 2009
A violent warning for Thailand's urban elites
By Tom Plate
Until recently (before all the rioting, violence and assassination plotting) Thailand would not have appeared to be a deeply troubled society. Generally speaking, Thais were, as endlessly advertised, scintillatingly smiley, and the country as a whole — vast rolling expanses of poverty notwithstanding...
Japanese markets brace for triple whammy if opposition wins big
A Sanseito campaign van in Shinjuku. The populist party is gaining ground and challenging the more centrist parties.
Polls open for key Upper House election that could shake Japanese politics
People vote during Japan's Upper House election at a polling station in Tokyo on Sunday.
Japan team finds ancient ocean full of squids
The ancient ocean was full of squids, whose population exceeded that of fish or ammonites, a Japanese research team mainly from Hokkaido University has found through a new method using technology.
Sunken WWII Japanese warship Teruzuki found off Solomon Islands
The Solomon Islands. A team from the U.S. nonprofit Ocean Exploration Trust has discovered the Imperial Japanese Navy destroyer Teruzuki on the deep seabed off the Solomon Islands as the 80th anniversary of the war's end approaches.
Living conditions index hits lowest level in 15 years in Japan
The share of respondents to a Bank of Japan quarterly survey in June who said they have become worse off came to 61.0%, up 5.1 percentage points from the previous survey.
Japan's rice farmers are confounded by Shinjiro Koizumi’s policies
Kiyoshi Shibata stands in front of one of the rice paddies in Murayama, Yamagata Prefecture, where he produces the prefecture's signature rice brand Tsuyahime.
From stalking to death threats, female candidates still face harassment
Mayu Ushida, a former NHK newscaster running for election in the Tokyo electoral district on the Democratic Party for the People ticket, signs an autograph for a voter after a public rally at Shinjuku Station in Tokyo on Tuesday.
Kawaii Lab redefines idol pop for the TikTok generation
Misa Kimura is the main producer for Kawaii Lab, a project by entertainment agency Asobisystem whose groups have found success by pairing a social media-first strategy with a fresh perspective on traditional idol-pop tropes.
Craig Mod's life in motion in a disappearing Japan
Mod's memoir “Things Become Other Things” chronicles his walking trips across the Kii Peninsula, surveying “a graceful end to a certain life cycle.”
With China and Trump, Japan defense report says world entering ‘new era of crisis’
A senior member of a Self-Defense Forces honor guard inspects a formation before the arrival of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba for a visit to the Defense Ministry in Tokyo on June 30.

Podcast

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

Longform

After pandemic-era border regulations eased, Indian migrants began returning to Japan. Their population now stands at more than 50,000 across the country.
How remote work is rewriting the migrant experience in Japan
By Megha Wadhwa

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