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COMMENTARY / Japan
Sep 8, 2015

Troubling Sino-Japanese ties

The animus between China and Japan should scare the rest of the world — especially the U.S., which could get dragged into war with a nuclear power.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Sep 8, 2015

Don't blame schools for worker shortages

Both Japanese and U.S. companies blame the education system for their alleged shortage of workers, but the complaint fails to stand up to scrutiny.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 7, 2015

What's with news media that censor news?

The mainstream media should realize that publishing graphic war-related images can help jar the world into taking action, and censoring such images delays action.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 7, 2015

Beijing's history narrative

The grand parade in the center of Beijing on Sept. 3 to commemorate the end of World War II in China highlighted two contradictory narratives, both immensely important for understanding the country's future path.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 7, 2015

Will China crash and follow in Japan's footsteps?

If China experiences an economic fate similar to that of Japan, will it become more nationalistic abroad to distract from domestic disappointments?
COMMUNITY / Issues / JUST BE CAUSE
Sep 6, 2015

Why Japan's right keeps leaving the left in the dust

The left keeps losing, and much of it is its own damned fault.
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Sep 5, 2015

Feast from the forest: foraging for edible plants in Japan

In the opening poem of "Kokin Wakashu" ("Collection of Japanese Poems of Ancient and Modern Times"), the Emperor writes about harvesting sansai (wild plants). The emperors of the Heian and Nara periods made it a rule to seek sansai in the forests in order to collect food and predict the harvest.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 3, 2015

Trump makes a lot of sense on foreign policy

Donald Trump may be the most sensible Republican in the race, at least on foreign policy.
Japan Times
WORLD / Crime & Legal
Sep 1, 2015

Pot smoking on U.S. college campuses at 35-year high: study

The number of U.S. college students smoking marijuana every day or nearly every day is greater than it has been in 35 years, according to a study released on Tuesday.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Aug 28, 2015

Tokyo native looks to put innovation, not money, into creative sports open to all

While Japan looks forward to hosting the world's biggest and glitziest sports event five years from now, a Tokyo man is promoting a series of innovative, quirky sports that are played simply for the fun of it.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 28, 2015

Oil is Islamic State's lifeblood

A key to defeating the Islamic State militant group is preventing it from gaining control of lucrative oil fields.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 27, 2015

Dumbing down: the key to U.S. political success

Stupidity exists everywhere, but what makes it stand out in America is that most Americans don't think it's bad to be dumb.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 25, 2015

The value of China's devaluation

China's currency devaluation has advanced its strategic goal of turning the RMB into an international reserve currency — and, in the long term, into a credible global challenger to the U.S. dollar.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / BLACK EYE
Aug 23, 2015

'Are you serious, God? An Asian dude? Really?'

When I approached Tara Kamiya — a 38-year-old housewife, mother of three biracial kids and self-professed workforce dodger — about being interviewed for this story, explaining to her the goal not only of this series (about black women and their Japanese guys) but of Black Eye as a whole, she was...
ASIA PACIFIC / ANALYSIS
Aug 23, 2015

MH370 civil investigators fear criminal probes could hurt efforts to make flying safer

Air crash investigators risk being sidelined in a tussle to unlock the secrets of lost Flight MH370, fueling concerns that their role in making flying safer could be diminished.
CULTURE / Books
Aug 22, 2015

Descending to the depths of Yukio Mishima's 'Sea of Fertility'

It was 45 years ago this summer that Donald Keene, a leading critic and translator of Japanese literature, visited Yukio Mishima at his summer writing retreat on the Izu Peninsula.
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health
Aug 22, 2015

Scans reveal how poverty hurts children's brains

Growing up poor has long been linked to lower academic test scores. And there's now mounting evidence that it's partly because kids can suffer real physical consequences from low family incomes, including brains that are less equipped to learn.
Japan Times
WORLD / Science & Health
Aug 20, 2015

Invasive plants pose billion-dollar threat to economies around the world

Many of the world's plants are turning "alien," spread by people into new areas where they choke out native vegetation in a worsening trend that causes billions of dollars in damage, scientists said on Wednesday.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 19, 2015

Brazil's Olympic dig unearths a royal toothbrush

As Rio de Janeiro prepares to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, archaeology is enjoying a revival, thanks in part to an unlikely convergence of bureaucracy and sensibility.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 19, 2015

Animated antidotes to Pixar-Disney eye candy

Children's animated films, like just about everything else these days, are mostly created by a couple of mega-corporations. Some days it seems like the only animations out there are digitally rendered, hyperactive "Pix-ney" flicks filled with pop-culture wisecracks and supported by a $100 million budget....
MORE SPORTS
Aug 16, 2015

Report claims IAAF suppressed doping survey

World athletics' governing body has suppressed a 2011 survey that reveals that up to a third of the world's top competitors admitted using banned performance-enhancing techniques, Britain's Sunday Times and German broadcaster ARD/WDR reported.
JAPAN / History
Aug 15, 2015

Dependence day: Japan's lopsided relationship with Washington

Of all the post-World War II changes in Japan, the most momentous is that it never regained the status of a genuinely independent country.
JAPAN / Politics
Aug 15, 2015

Growing influence of Japan Conference reflects resentment at Tokyo's postwar settlement with Washington

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in April delivered a speech to the U.S. Congress — the first by a Japanese leader — that lauded deepening trade ties and the military alliance with the United States.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Aug 15, 2015

Abe statement was vague in all the wrong places

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made a hash of his long-anticipated statement on Friday commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Japan Times
CULTURE / CULTURE SMASH
Aug 15, 2015

AKB48 turns to an American studio

AKB48’s  commercial success in Japan is often derided as a sign of the culture’s patriarchal infantilization of women, and the girl group’s inability to appeal to Western audiences a sign of Japan’s increasingly isolated ideas about femininity, sexuality and pop music. Put simply: outside of...
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 14, 2015

Islamic State's perverse militarization of 'hijra'

Before 'hijra' became militarized, it was used to hold the present accountable to the past. In this richer, if more elusive, sense, hijra far exceeds — indeed, confounds — Islamic State's remit.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 11, 2015

The historian who helped kill the Soviet Union

Born in the same year as the Soviet Union, historian Robert Conquest helped kill it with information.
Japan Times
WORLD / Society
Aug 10, 2015

Modi's quest to put India's poor to work stymied by rise of robots

In a sweltering factory in southern India, Royal Enfield motorcycles are being painted and lacquered by giant robotic arms that move at twice the maximum speed of a human limb, day in, day out, never making a mistake.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / LAW OF THE LAND
Aug 9, 2015

Is Japan equipped to handle historic decisions that cost lives, limbs and loved ones?

Perhaps calendars should indicate not just holidays, but the dates on which important people in our collective pasts made decisions that caused tremendous harm.

Longform

A small shrine perched atop rocks braves the waves hitting the shoreline during a storm in Shimoda, Shizuoka Prefecture. The area is under threat of a possible 31-meter-high tsunami if an earthquake strikes the nearby Nankai Trough.
If the 'Big One' hits, this city could face a 31-meter-high tsunami