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November 05, 2025

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EDITORIALS

Jan 20, 1999

Pyongyang's bluster

It has been four years since the United States and North Korea negotiated their framework agreement to dismantle the latter's clandestine nuclear-weapons program. Progress -- if one can call it that -- has been slow. Hopes that tensions on the Korean Peninsula would abate have been frustrated. Last weekend,...

EDITORIALS

Jan 19, 1999

A regional test for Japan

If the International Monetary Fund today serves, in effect, as a tough lender of last resort globally, Japan last year gave itself the role of a friendly neighborhood bank in East Asia. That choice has proved timely, but it has become more challenging as the new year began. Unsettling news from two places...

EDITORIALS

Jan 16, 1999

Coalition's anticlimactic debut

The curtain rose Thursday on the new conservative coalition government to reveal just one more unimpressive performance of the same old political drama. Much had been said and written about the apparent significance of the realignment, but it seems to have ended up as essentially just another political...

EDITORIALS

Jan 15, 1999

Embarrassed in Malaysia

In a surprising move, Malaysian prosecutors have amended four of the charges that have been brought against former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. The prosecutors claim the changes are superficial. The amendments now say that Mr. Anwar used the police to get witnesses to retract allegations that...

EDITORIALS

Jan 14, 1999

Dangerous posturing in Brazil

Meeting in Hong Kong earlier this week, 17 of the world's central bankers expressed cautious optimism that the Asian economic crisis had bottomed out. Any relief those comments might have inspired was short-lived: Almost immediately after came reports of a political standoff in Brazil. If President Fernando...

EDITORIALS

Jan 13, 1999

Avoiding a toxic meltdown

A survey conducted last year by the Environment Agency showed that endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or environmental hormones, had been detected in most of Japan's water systems. It also indicated that dioxin in excess of standardized limits existed in the air in the Tokyo Metropolitan area and many other...

EDITORIALS

Jan 12, 1999

More than just a lot of hot air

Last month, we became accustomed to seeing daily more riveting images of a huge, upside-down-pear-shaped bag: now rising from the Moroccan desert, now sailing over the Himalayas, now poised photogenically above Mount Fuji.

EDITORIALS

Jan 9, 1999

Marriage, divorce and the future

In the early days of a new year, when most of the public is on holiday and many people are traveling away from home, it is all too easy for important news to be overlooked or even dismissed as nothing new. That seems to have been the case with the scant attention paid to the announcement published on...

EDITORIALS

Jan 8, 1999

The trial of the century

On Thursday, the 100 senators of the 106th U.S. Congress were sworn in as jurors to hear the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. The legislators, who consider themselves part of "the world's greatest deliberative body," thus began the second such trial in U.S. history, 131 years after their...

EDITORIALS

Jan 7, 1999

Courting risks in Angola

Twice in the last two weeks, U.N.-chartered aircraft have crashed in central Angola. In both cases, the fate of the passengers and crew -- 24 people in total -- is unknown, as is the cause of the crashes. Neither the government nor the rebels of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola...

EDITORIALS

Jan 6, 1999

Paying for our technology fetish

Most people must have heard about the so-called "Year 2000 problem," or Y2K, as the turn-of-the-millennium computer glitch is known in techno-speak. Newspaper columns are filled with warnings of pandemonium in banking systems, airport control towers and other vital public facilities, just because computers,...

EDITORIALS

Jan 5, 1999

Some crimes cannot be forgiven

The end of the Khmer Rouge, the gang of zealots who killed at least 1 million people in the four years they ruled Cambodia, was only a matter of time. Mercifully, it seems that time has finally come. Late last month, two of the three surviving leaders of the movement, Mr. Khieu Samphan and Mr. Nuon Chea,...

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

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Once smoky, male-dominated spaces, today's net cafes, like Kaikatsu Club, are working to make their operations more attractive to women customers.

The second life of Japan's net cafes

By Alex K.T. Martin

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Maruhachi never sleeps in quest for better futons

Maruhachi never sleeps in quest for better futons

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