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Reader Mail
Oct 9, 2011

Ripoffs on parade in Roppongi

I find it quite humorous that TV celebrity Shimada Shinsuke is mentioned in the article ("Tokyo, Okinawa usher in antigang legislation") as if he were a criminal — guilt by association.
Reader Mail
Oct 9, 2011

Think of the survivors' feelings

I was surprised to read the headline of the Oct. 4 Kyodo article "Disaster-zone population would've fallen 46% anyway: study." It suggests that the loss of life — if not from the 3/11 tsunami and earthquake — was going to occur anyway (by 2040). It lacks any sense of condolence for the victims.
Reader Mail
Oct 9, 2011

Thorium reactors for the future

Regarding the Oct. 5 Kyodo article "Japan panned for pushing nuke plant exports after accident": I despair of the black comedy of Tokyo Electric Power Co. pressure and my Japanese friends' understandable, if naive, knee-jerk reaction to it.
Reader Mail
Oct 9, 2011

Decay within the legal system

Regarding the Oct. 1 front-page article "Tokyo, Okinawa usher in antigang legislation": Why is any new legislation needed to combat criminals? Surely, by definition, criminals should be prosecuted because they are criminals. If not, why are the authorities always referring to such groups as organized...
Reader Mail
Oct 9, 2011

In praise of Noda's good sense

Regarding the Oct. 4 front-page article "Noda halts state housing complex": Low-cost housing for civil servants flies in the face of all of us who have to pay through the nose here in Tokyo by having to fork up extra months of rent money and contract fees every two years, while the government does nothing...
Reader Mail
Oct 9, 2011

Past opportunities for Palestine

Kevin Gaffney's Oct. 2 letter, "Effects of disenfranchisement," claims that Palestinian Arabs could "become citizens of their own nation through the United Nations as Israelis did, but that peaceful path has been blocked by, of all people, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, (U.S. President) Barack Obama."...
Japan Times
MORE SPORTS
Oct 9, 2011

Iso happy to leave pro game to follow dream at OSU

For Ariko Iso, a stint with one of the NFL's perennial powerhouses may have only been a path to achieve her ultimate goal.
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Oct 9, 2011

Television's skewed version of poverty

The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations currently taking place in New York continue to garner more and more attention from the American media, which mostly ignored the movement when it began several weeks ago. Now everybody in America who reads a newspaper or watches TV news understands that the protesters...
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 8, 2011

Rescuing America from Wall Street

Better late than never, the movement to take America back from Wall Street has arrived. This week the ranks of the Occupy Wall Street encampment swelled as MoveOn.org members, union activists and ordinary disgruntled citizens joined the demonstration against our financial sector's misrule of the American...
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 8, 2011

Love and loathing of racial preferments Down Under

In 2009, in two articles published in the Herald Sun and the Herald and Weekly Times, columnist Andrew Bolt wrote that many light-skinned — that is, those who did not look Aboriginal — Australians had chosen to identify themselves as indigenous in order to gain material or professional advantage....
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Oct 8, 2011

Communication skill, beyond language, called key necessity

When Mark Rubiner drove tens of thousands of kilometers from Arizona to Mexico and through South America when he was only 21 years old, his high school Spanish skills became a key tool for survival.
EDITORIALS
Oct 8, 2011

Mr. Ozawa pleads not guilty

Former Democratic Party of Japan leader Ichiro Ozawa pleaded not guilty to the charge of conspiring with his three secretaries to falsify reports of his fund management body Rikuzankai, at the start of his trial at the Tokyo District Court on Thursday. The trial has a special character since it is based...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Oct 7, 2011

Helping Japan with a dance

Take any teenager nearly 10,000 km (6,000 miles) from home on their first-ever overseas trip and you are bound to reap wonder. For 16-year-old French ballerina Sylvie Guillem, who came to Tokyo with the Paris Opera Ballet School in 1981, that wonder grew into 30 years of mutual admiration.
Reader Mail
Oct 6, 2011

Plutonium perspective needed

Regarding the Oct. 1 Kyodo article "Plutonium traces found in Iitate (Fukushima Prefecture) soil": Traces of plutonium will be found at every location on Earth if the test is sensitive enough.
Reader Mail
Oct 6, 2011

Close the air station ... tomorrow

On Sept. 7 the Noda Cabinet's new Foreign Minister Koichiro Genba made an inaugural telephone call to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in which he assured her that Japan would stick to the accord reached last year to relocate U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma to Henoko in northern Okinawa....
Reader Mail
Oct 6, 2011

Doubts about Japan predate 3/11

I don't want to cross swords with Donald Wood, as I agree with most of what he says in his Oct. 2 letter, "Japanese leaders will find a way," but not with all. He misses the point of my Sept. 25 letter ("Mixed American views of Japan").
Reader Mail
Oct 6, 2011

Noda can't afford Futenma issue

The Oct. 3 editorial "Driving 'safe' through the Diet" states that Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda "is under pressure from the United States to resolve the issue of relocating U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma on Okinawa Island."
Reader Mail
Oct 6, 2011

Fitting reminder of an obligation

Regarding the Sept. 30 Kyodo article "Seoul urged to nix slave monument": The South Korean government should go ahead with the memorial to the "comfort women." It is clear that the Japanese government is hoping that the issue will die off along with the remaining handful of elderly Korean women. This...
Reader Mail
Oct 6, 2011

Look who's fretting about danger

For people who do not wish to see Russia regain its former strength, if not glory, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is a dangerous czar. Such is the narrative consistently sung by people like Ralph Peters, the writer of the Sept. 30 Washington Post article "Genius lurks in this dangerous czar."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Oct 6, 2011

Gamarjobat: Pantomime artists who have plenty to say

Tough-looking with their cockscomb mohawks — the red one topping Ketch!; the yellow one, HIRO-PON — the "silent-comedy" duo Gamarjobat ("Hello" in Georgian) are now well into a 31-stop tour that's filling theaters around the country with whoops and rollicking laughter — as well as their own "language"...
COMMENTARY
Oct 6, 2011

Integration outlook for ex-Soviets

It is well known that, in the political field, the 20th century brought about a strong and, as it turned out, omnipresent trend toward disintegration of former empires and the formation in their place of nation-states all over the crumbling colonial world.
EDITORIALS
Oct 6, 2011

Another blow to al-Qaida

ACIA drone strike has killed Anwar al-Awlaki, one of the world's most wanted terrorists. Awlaki's death is another blow to al-Qaida, and proof yet again of the extraordinary reach bestowed on the United States by its technology.
COMMENTARY
Oct 6, 2011

Few dare call it federal control of education

Obama Gives States a Voice In 'No Child' — New York Times, Sept. 24
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Oct 6, 2011

The patron saint of Japanese indie?

Steven Tanaka has a secret. The vibrant live-house scenes of Tokyo's Koenji and Shimokitazawa neighborhoods hold a special place in his heart, and since last year he has been spending vast sums to take some of that energy to Canada — just don't tell his parents.
Japan Times
BASKETBALL
Oct 5, 2011

Big Bulls ready to charge into debut bj-league season

The Iwate Big Bulls are about to begin experiencing something every professional sports team must encounter: an inaugural season.
BUSINESS
Oct 5, 2011

NEC touts 'smart innovation' for competitiveness

Fusing technologies of electronics industries, a Japanese strength, with other businesses is vital for the nation to increase its global competitiveness, NEC Corp. Chairman Kaoru Yano said Tuesday.
JAPAN / EXPLAINER
Oct 4, 2011

World Heritage listing has its price

News that Iwate Prefecture's historic Hiraizumi area and the Ogasawara Islands would be added to UNESCO's World Heritage List last June lifted the spirits of residents in the Tohoku region after the March 11 quake-tsunami trauma.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Oct 4, 2011

Left-behind dads take desperate measures

"In September of 2010, The Japan Times published a two-part series by a man under the pen name Richard Cory telling the extraordinary tale of his divorce and custody battles over his three children with his Japanese ex-wife . . . essentially custody by capture." — "Divorce and the Welfare of the Child...
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Oct 4, 2011

'Smart city' projects revived by disasters

Ever since the March 11 disasters exposed the nation's dependence on conventional power sources and infrastructure, energy-efficient "smart city" projects have drawn increasing attention.

Longform

A sinkhole in Yashio, which emerged in January, was triggered by a ruptured, aging sewer pipe. Authorities worry that similar sections of infrastructure across the country are also at risk of corrosion.
That sinking feeling: Japan’s aging sewers are an infrastructure time bomb