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August 14, 2025

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EDITORIALS

Apr 27, 2005

Human rights transcend nationality

Japanese media have given prominent coverage to the nationality issue in the past two weeks. The Tokyo District Court ruled April 13 in favor of a lawsuit seeking confirmation of Japanese nationality for a boy born to a Filipino woman and a Japanese man who are not legally married. According to the ruling,...

COMMENTARY

Apr 27, 2005

Electoral fatigue takes a toll on Britain

By Hugh Cortazzi

LONDON -- The British general election takes place May 5. It was formally announced April 3 but electioneering has been going on for months and many voters had become bored even before the dissolution of Parliament. It is widely feared that boredom and disillusionment with politicians of all the parties...

EDITORIALS

Apr 26, 2005

Mending battered ties

It appears that Japan-China relations, severely strained by recent anti-Japanese demonstrations in Chinese cities, are beginning to move toward rapprochement. Credit goes to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Chinese President Hu Jintao, who agreed on the urgent need to improve bilateral ties at a...

COMMENTARY / World

Apr 26, 2005

Japan and the United Nations

By Kazuo Ogoura

On Dec. 18, 1956, Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu stood before the General Assembly of the United Nations to make a speech marking Japan's admission to the organization. In this address he stated that as the only nation to suffer the ordeal of atomic bombing, Japan hoped with all its heart...

EDITORIALS

Apr 25, 2005

Better India-Pakistan relations

Last week Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agreed on various new confidence-building measures between the two nations. Their talks, held during Mr. Musharraf's unofficial visit to India on April 17, produced agreement, for example, on the passage of trucks...

COMMENTARY / World

Apr 25, 2005

Enough blame to go around

By Brad Glosserman and Scott Snyder

HONOLULU -- Deteriorating relations among Japan, South Korea and China underscore the failure of leadership in all three countries. Recent events have triggered a downward spiral in relations, but this shift hasn't occurred in a vacuum. All three governments share the primary burden to set a strategic...

COMMENTARY

Apr 25, 2005

Koizumi policy seeded storm

By Kiroku Hanai

In recent weeks, mass anti-Japanese protests, the largest since Tokyo and Beijing normalized diplomatic relations in 1972, have occurred in major Chinese cities. As a result, Sino-Japanese relations, already considered cold on the political front, could cool economically.

COMMENTARY / THE VIEW FROM NEW YORK

Apr 25, 2005

Knight still mounted on a tethered horse

By Hiroaki Sato

NEW YORK -- In 1958 there was a political upheaval in Iraq, which, as far as that country at that particular juncture in history was concerned, was the final rejection of Western rule. But Japan's reaction was shifty and muddled. Or so writer Yukio Mishima (1925-70) thought.

EDITORIALS

Apr 24, 2005

Bamboozled by buzzwords

A re you baffled by words you hear or read every day? Does it sometimes seem as if the language is being suffocated by technological doublespeak? Is your ability to do your job, buy a computer or read a manual being undermined because whole swaths of English are now so incomprehensible they might as...

COMMENTARY / World

Apr 24, 2005

Getting Yangon to show a little respect

By George Sioris

CHANG MAI, Thailand -- There has been a lot of discussion recently about Myanmar's assumption of the presidency of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations next year. It is obvious that most members wish to prevent this anomaly from happening. Let's reflect on some of the more realistic,...

COMMENTARY

Apr 24, 2005

A provincial pitch for votes

By David Howell

LONDON -- Britain is now in the grip of a general election campaign with voting due May 5. As with political campaigns generally in the modern world, this one is heavily oriented toward domestic issues and disputes. Globalization and the worldwide information revolution seem to have had the opposite...

COMMENTARY / World

Apr 24, 2005

Purge U.N. panel of the freedom-haters

By Per Ahlmark

STOCKHOLM -- For Sweden, my homeland, the United Nations is a sacred cow. But today, many Swedes, like others around the world, are having second thoughts. Three events incited these doubts. The first was the slaughter in Rwanda a decade ago of more than 800,000 people within 100 days -- probably the...

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

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Koichi Tagawa’s diary entry from Aug. 9, 1945, describes the day of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

The horrors of Nagasaki, in first person

By Naoko Abe

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