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EDITORIALS

Dec 11, 2008

Education loan accountability

The Japan Students Services Organization (JASSO), a student loan provider under the wing of the education ministry, is suffering from a high delinquency rate on loan payments. Starting in fiscal 2010, it will tell all new borrowers that it will report long-term delinquent borrowers to an organization...

COMMENTARY / World

Dec 10, 2008

Making quality the key to Web searches

By Riza C. Berkan

NEW YORK — In the not-so-distant future, students will be able to graduate from high school without ever touching a book. Twenty years ago, they could graduate from high school without ever using a computer. In only a few decades, computer technology and the Internet have transformed the core principles...

EDITORIALS

Dec 10, 2008

Precipitous drop in popularity

A Cabinet is said to have entered "dangerous waters" if its public approval rating sinks below 30 percent. Only 2 1/2 months after Mr. Taro Aso came into power, the approval rating for his Cabinet has fallen to 25.5 percent, a drop of 15.4 percentage points from November, according to a Kyodo News poll....

COMMENTARY

Dec 10, 2008

Don't allow terrorists to win

By Hugh Cortazzi

The horrific attacks in Mumbai have raised a number of serious questions for the Indian authorities. Why was there no forewarning? Were those responsible for gathering and interpreting intelligence negligent or did they lack adequate resources? Why was the counterterrorist response apparently so slow...

EDITORIALS

Dec 10, 2008

Health net for children

A September survey by the health and welfare ministry has found that about 32,900 children throughout the country were not covered by health insurance because their parents had failed to pay premiums to the National Health Insurance system (Kokumin Kenko Hoken). Irregularly employed workers, unemployed...

COMMENTARY / World

Dec 10, 2008

Managing the international economic crisis

By Kumiharu Shigehara

"After the Storm?" was the main title of the editorial of Economic Outlook 83 published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris last May. Developments since then have been such that it would have been a disaster for OECD forecasters if the question mark had not been...

COMMENTARY / World

Dec 9, 2008

Benefiting from a dream market

By Kevin Rafferty

HONG KONG — As the world economy reels from bad to worse, and economists go from talking of recession to swapping stories of the Great Depression of the 1930s, eyes turn to China and to what it might, can and should do in its newly emerging role as a global player both economically and politically....

COMMENTARY

Dec 9, 2008

America's chance to change course on Cuba

By Cesar Chelala

NEW YORK — The new political landscape in Washington and Havana offers a chance to change a foreign policy decision that has caused considerable, and unnecessary, suffering for almost half a century — the U.S. embargo against Cuba.

EDITORIALS

Dec 9, 2008

Budget in disarray

The government has adopted a basic policy for the fiscal 2009 budget compilation. It will maintain budget caps introduced in 2006 by the Koizumi administration, which include a 3-percent annual cut in public-works spending and a ¥220 billion reduction each year in the natural growth of social security...

COMMENTARY / World

Dec 9, 2008

Thailand turns: next stop Banana Republic

By Sin-ming Shaw

BANGKOK — "Thailand's future is up for grabs," proclaimed the eminent Thai scholar Thitinan Pongsudhirak last week just before the country's Constitutional Court ruled, in effect, that the ruling People Power Party (PPP) and its two smaller coalition partners are "illegal," and hence must disband because...

EDITORIALS

Dec 9, 2008

Betrayal of public trust

An investigative committee on Nov. 28 handed welfare minister Yoichi Masuzoe a report stating that workers at local offices of the Social Insurance Agency systematically falsified pension records of company employees. Falsification consisted of (1) recording employee salaries as lower than their actual...

COMMENTARY / World

Dec 8, 2008

The needy, human face of a warming planet

By Saleemul Huq and Camilla Toulmin

PRAGUE — A clever new gadget was described in a newspaper a few weeks ago. It pulls water out of the atmosphere and delivers you a glass of clean, chilled H2O. It's wonderful what technology can offer for the wealthy.

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

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

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

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Ishii Iron Works remakes self for workers, new energy

Ishii Iron Works remakes self for workers, new energy

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