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COMMENTARY
Apr 10, 2011

Realigned values help global order evolve

CANBERRA — On March 17, Security Council Resolution 1973 authorized the use of "all necessary measures," short of an invasion and occupation, "to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas": the first United Nations-sanctioned combat operations since the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
CULTURE / Books
Apr 10, 2011

Colonial Japan and the first 'Korean Wave'

PRIMITIVE SELVES: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-1945, by E. Taylor Atkins. University of California Press, 2010, 280 pp., $24.95 (paper) While pop-culture industry insiders reputedly hate the term, and discussion of it has generally waned in Korea, the "Korean Wave" remains inescapable...
CULTURE / Books
Apr 10, 2011

Poetry lies in wait to spring at our throats

NONZEN POEMS, by Morgan Gibson. Printed Matter Press, 2010, 100 pp., $15 (paper) Translator, scholar and poet Morgan Gibson's collection "Nonzen Poems" divides into four parts concerned variously with breath, nature, Buddhism, and the author's mentors and contemporaries — notably Kenneth Rexroth and...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Apr 8, 2011

'The Killer Inside Me'

If you like your film noir darker than a Texas outhouse on a new moon in June, and if you don't mind being shocked — and I mean really shocked — then here's your film: "The Killer Inside Me," director Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of the cult noir novel from 1952 by that most hard-boiled of authors,...
COMMENTARY
Apr 7, 2011

West is on a slippery slope

NEW DELHI — From initially seeking to protect civilians to now aiming for a swift, total victory in Libya, the mission creep that has characterized the Western powers' military attack raises troubling questions about their Libyan strategy and the risks that it could end up creating — however inadvertently...
COMMENTARY
Apr 5, 2011

Equality for women helps to reduce hunger

NEW YORK — Giving women the same tools and resources as men, such as financial support, education and access to markets, could reduce the number of hungry people worldwide by up to 150 million, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
CULTURE / Books
Apr 3, 2011

Sojourner of the mystical realm

THE PASSING SUMMERS, The Japanese Mystique: Charm and Consequence, by Ivy C. Machida. Printed Matter Press, 2010, 280 pp., $20 (paper) The 21st century has seen a proliferation of memoirs entering the book market — from James Frey's memoir-fiction "A Million Little Pieces" to the slew of ghosted celebrity...
CULTURE / Books
Apr 3, 2011

Burma, the broken country

EVERYTHING IS BROKEN: The Untold Story of Disaster Under Burma's Military Regime, by Emma Larkin. Granta, 2010, 265 pp., £12.99 (paper) Tropical storms are given names by meteorological offices around the world. In English we generally prefer to be anthropomorphic, using male and female names alternately,...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Apr 3, 2011

Japan's reaction to Fukushima may point to a better way of living

One day in September 1923, the great writer and poet of the Tohoku region, Kenji Miyazawa, went into woods not far from his hometown of Hanamaki in Iwate Prefecture to chop down a tree. Suddenly rocks broke away from the cliff, rocks he called "assassins." But he was not surprised or shocked. "After...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 31, 2011

France's hard right embraces soft populism

PARIS — The central paradox of French politics was confirmed once again March 27. In a nationwide vote to select local authorities (the so-called Conseiller General), the far-right National Front gained 11 percent of the votes cast, but secured only 0.1 percent of the seats.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 30, 2011

Japan's crisis leadership

Amid the horrifying news from Japan, the establishment of new standards of political leadership there is easy to miss — in part because the Japanese media follow old habits of automatically criticizing how officials are dealing with the calamity, and many foreign reporters who lack perspective simply...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 25, 2011

'Kamifusen (Paper Balloon)'

Omnibus films must have a unifying theme, however loose or gimmicky; otherwise, they're a collection of shorts. And while there's nothing wrong with shorts as such, when packaged as a feature film, they are, as all distributors know, box-office suicide.
LIFE / Food & Drink
Mar 24, 2011

Japan's unlikely hero: the humble rice ball

One of the quiet heroes to emerge in this time of grave crisis in Japan is the humble little white ball of rice called onigiri or omusubi.
COMMENTARY
Mar 23, 2011

Nuclear power no solution

NEW DELHI — Just when nuclear energy had come to be seen as part of the solution to energy and global-warming challenges, the serial reactor incidents in Fukushima have dealt a severe blow to the world nuclear-power industry, a powerful cartel of less than a dozen major state-owned or state-guided...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 22, 2011

Egyptians share a demand with Californians

SINGAPORE — While Egypt has had too little democracy and is moving toward more, California has had too much democracy and is moving toward less. The common mean point they should arrive at is democracy that delivers good government — not mushy "governance."
CULTURE / Books
Mar 20, 2011

The protocols of freedom

THE ETIQUETTE OF FREEDOM: Gary Snyder, Jim Harrison, and The Practice of the Wild. Edited by Paul Ebenkamp. This is a companion to the film "The Practice of the Wild," directed by John J. Healey, produced by Will Hearst and Jim Harrison with San Simeon Films. Counterpoint, 2010, 160 pp., $28 (cloth/DVD) Snyder...
COMMENTARY
Mar 20, 2011

Acting responsibly to save Libyan civilians

WATERLOO, Ontario — The responsibility to protect is the mobilizer of last resort of the world's will to act to prevent and halt mass atrocities and mitigate the effects of sovereignty as organized hypocrisy, as Stephen Krasner famously put it.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Mar 19, 2011

Poetess achieves duality of words, numbers

Statistically, there's no accounting for Jessica Goodfellow's life in Japan. The daughter of an engineer, on a fast track in her early 20s to a Ph.D. in economics at California Institute of Technology, Goodfellow realized something essential didn't correlate: her incalculable love of poetry.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 18, 2011

Disaster clobbers a helper

The massive earthquake and tsunami that rocked and ravaged large parts of northern Japan have caused near apocalyptic devastation to the land and the environment. The 9.0-magnitude shock, the largest ever recorded in the earthquake-prone country, was brutally magnified by massive tsunami waves that washed...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Mar 18, 2011

'Never let Me Go'/'Away We Go'

The challenge this week is how to convince you to go see "Never Let Me Go" without ruining its surprises for you. The film looks deceptively normal: It's a love triangle with Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan set in 1970s and '80s England. But — and this is a huge but — there's...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 17, 2011

Longtime Arab myths versus today's realities

WASHINGTON — With Hosni Mubarak's ouster in Egypt — widely considered to have one of the region's most stable regimes until only recently — and Col. Moammar Gadhafi clinging to power in Libya, there is no clear end in sight to the turmoil sweeping across the Arab world. Protests have already toppled...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 16, 2011

Tale of two defense policies

LONDON — China has declared that its official defense budget for 2011 will rise by 12.7 percent from the previous year. Last year there was a lot of hoopla surrounding the fact that China had announced a mere 7.5 percent jump in defense budget. It was the first time since the 1980s that China's defense...
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Mar 15, 2011

Kicking up a stink over ink in Kobe

You might want to avoid Suma Beach this summer if you are inked or have even a temporary sticker tattoo. The powers that be in Kobe City are considering ways to ban the display of tattoos on the beach.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 15, 2011

Prospects for an integrated army in Nepal

BEPPU, Oita Prefecture — Be it the Nepali Congress Rebellion in 1950-51 and 1961-62 or the movement for democracy in the 1990s, such events have had profound impacts on the political and socio-economic condition of the country.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 13, 2011

Is the world ready for a China slowdown?

BERKELEY, Calif. — With the world's rich countries still hung over from the financial crisis, the global economy has come to depend on emerging markets to drive growth. Increasingly, machinery exporters, energy suppliers and raw-materials producers alike look to China and other fast-growing developing...
CULTURE / Books
Mar 13, 2011

Of goldfish and food demons

A RIOT OF GOLDFISH, by Kanoko Okamoto. Translated by J. Keith Vincent. Hesperus Press, 2010, 136 pp., £8.99 (paper) Between 1929 and 1932, the poet Kanoko Okamoto traveled through Europe and the U.S. with her husband, the cartoonist Ippei Okamoto, her son and two male retainers. The group visited the...
ENVIRONMENT
Mar 13, 2011

Japan as a rice culture? Not so quick, says anthropologist

What could be more Japanese than rice? Without the pearly white grain there would be no mochi (rice cakes) at New Year's or sake at shrines, no sushi, no lunchtime onigiri (rice balls), no verdant paddies to mark summer in the countryside.
Reader Mail
Mar 10, 2011

Let human capital trump arms race

Regarding Hiroaki Sato's Feb. 27 article, "Indefensible costs of military one-upmanship ": When it comes to national defense, Japan needs to accumulate human capital instead of participating in the arms race. In the 21st century, when many countries are locked in fierce competition to obtain natural...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Mar 10, 2011

Briton excels at helping foreign women adjust

Japan got a little better last year in gender equality, according to the World Economic Forum: It moved up in the rankings to 94th place out of 134 countries, from 101st in 2009.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY
Mar 10, 2011

Zen psychology: Daisetz Suzuki remembered

Despite the gloomy global economy, the field of positive psychology is booming. Often described simplistically by journalists as "the science of happiness," it's actually a broad focus on our strengths and talents, virtues and peak experiences in daily living. The name for this specialty originated with...

Longform

Mount Fuji is considered one of Japan's most iconic symbols and is a major draw for tourists. It's still a mountain, though, and potential hikers need to properly prepare for any climb.
What it takes to save lives on Mount Fuji