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COMMENTARY
Mar 10, 2008

Redundant royal honors provoke wonder

HONOLULU — Not every monarch is alike. It's true that many are mean and greedy and full of themselves — selfish squirrels who sock their ill-gotten gains beneath everyone's eyes overseas while they stick their political opponents into dark dank prisons — or graves. But some are comparatively mild,...
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 9, 2008

Opposite poles of protest 40 years ago

WARSAW — In Paris, West Berlin, London and Rome, the spring of 1968 was marked by student protests against the Vietnam War.
Japan Times
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Mar 7, 2008

Booker pioneer Maschler to share publishing passions

Tom Maschler, a legendary British editor who put 13 Nobel Prize-winning authors into print, will address audiences at two events set for March 18 and 20 in Tokyo.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 5, 2008

Putin's unwilling executioner?

NEW YORK — The question that has dominated Russian politics, and world discussion of Russian politics — will he (Vladimir Putin) or won't he stay in power? — has now been settled. He will and he won't.
COMMENTARY
Mar 3, 2008

Oscar for patient diplomacy

LOS ANGELES — For much of the first few years of the new millennium, North Korea was viewed as the most probable nation-state aggressor in Asia.
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Mar 2, 2008

Will Japan's insular mindset ever be inclusive of others?

First of two parts
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Mar 2, 2008

Shintaro Tsuji: 'Mr. Cute' shares his wisdoms and wit

Shintaro Tsuji isn't joking when he says he wants to make Hello Kitty, his company's best-selling character, into a brand name that rivals Gucci or Hermes.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 28, 2008

Why's Japan grown so ugly?

YUNOMINE, Wakayama Pref. — My brother wanted to create a new room in the loft of his house in an English provincial city, actually Kingston upon Hull (population 250,000), a place of passing interest to Japanese because two centuries ago it was one of the world's biggest whaling ports. Today, the whales...
EDITORIALS
Feb 26, 2008

Fidel Castro steps down

Fidel Castro, one of the world's longest tenured leaders, resigned this month. His decision to step down, long anticipated, opens a period of uncertainty for Cuba, but hopes for sweeping change are muted. Mr. Castro's brother Raul was picked to succeed him.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Feb 26, 2008

U.S. military crime: SOFA so good?

On Friday night, Aug. 18, 2006, at a third-story apartment within a gated community outside Atlanta, Ga., 31-year-old Kendrick Ledet sat contemplating life. And death.
CULTURE / Books
Feb 24, 2008

Stephen Barber: Re-imagining the Megalopolis

THE TOKYO TRILOGY by Stephen Barber. Creation Books, 2008, 320 pp., $16.95 (paper) Apocalyptic orgasms, feral abattoir gangs and the digitalization of Hitler's ghost rarely appear in mainstream literature, and Stephen Barber's "The Tokyo Trilogy" — comprising "Tokyo Sodom," "Tokyo Slaughterhouse" and...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Feb 24, 2008

Asian art for art's sake

WHAT'S THE USE OF ART? — Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context, edited by Jan Mrazek and Morgan Pitelka. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008, 314 pp., with illustrations, $58 (cloth) The question is rhetorical, that is, uttered for effect, to make a statement rather than to obtain an...
COMMENTARY
Feb 21, 2008

Starting with Kyoto, Rudd aims high

LOS ANGELES — Before too much time goes by, maybe somebody ought to take note of the smart political stuff coming out of Australia lately.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Feb 21, 2008

Loss of father to ALS inspires play about disease

The death of their father a decade ago gave Rumi and Takuya Iryo a new goal in their lives — raising public awareness of the disease he died from, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease.
COMMENTARY
Feb 20, 2008

Obstacles to overcome in the development of a concert of Asia-Pacific democracies

NEW DELHI — The new Australian government is signaling a wish to turn its back on an initiative bringing four major democracies of the Asia-Pacific together, even as U.S. Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has vowed to institutionalize that venture.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Feb 20, 2008

Nature tour turns sour as we see 'endangered' prey killed

A great white mass, a broken blanket of sea ice, was moving south down the Sea of Okhotsk carried on currents and blown by winds from the north. From the flank of Mount Mokoto it appeared like a mirage, a whitened margin to the sea's northern horizon, but from the much closer range of the cliff tops...
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / JAPAN TIMES BLOGROLL
Feb 20, 2008

The Blog from Another Dimension

The Blog from Another Dimension might conjure up images of science fiction, but click through to Luis Poza's blog and you'll quickly see that it's about the here and now, cataloging his thoughts about current events, technology and social issues in Japan.
COMMENTARY
Feb 17, 2008

China's path deserves respect, not fear

LOS ANGELES — Let's not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Congressional grumblings about currency and balance-of-trade issues, and equal grumps from the U.S. Democratic Party's leftwing (over human-rights issues), could leave the impression that U.S. policy toward China has been a dismal failure....
Reader Mail
Feb 17, 2008

Whale calves hunted for years

Regarding C.W. Nicol's Feb. 9 article, "Killing calves makes Japan's whaling indefensible": It is surprising that the author finds it indefensible that calves and their mothers are killed in the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary under special permits issued by the Japanese authorities. Since 1986 it has...
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 14, 2008

Washington suffering from debt delusion

WASHINGTON — A second big American interest-rate cut in a fortnight, alongside an economic stimulus plan that united Republicans and Democrats, demonstrates that U.S. policymakers are keen to head off a recession that looks like the consequence of rising mortgage defaults and falling home prices. But...
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 10, 2008

War rages against 'elites' of tolerance

AMSTERDAM — When "tolerance" becomes a term of abuse in a place like the Netherlands, you know that something has gone seriously wrong. The Dutch always took pride in being the most tolerant people on Earth.
SPORTS / SPORTS SCOPE
Feb 10, 2008

Ruling in Powell case latest example of NPB ineptitude

"Only in Japan."
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 8, 2008

Breaking the monopoly on econ theory

WASHINGTON — For 25 years, the so-called Washington Consensus — comprising measures aimed at expanding the role of markets and constraining the role of the state — has dominated economic development policy. As John Williamson, who coined the term, put it in 2002, these measures "are motherhood...
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 6, 2008

European Union is MIA in Afghanistan

PRAGUE — The withdrawal of Britain's Paddy Ashdown as a candidate for the post of U.N. envoy in Afghanistan means that the international community still has some way to go before it speaks with one voice in that country. Such a unified voice is needed, for six years of war and the biggest military...
Japan Times
JAPAN
Feb 6, 2008

Shakespeare 'karuta' ambition realized

To be or not to be has never really been a question for Shakespeare aficionado Ayako Yoshimi.
COMMENTARY
Feb 6, 2008

When snow falls on China and Japan

LOS ANGELES — Snow has been falling on two of the world's greatest cities — lightly on Tokyo, brutally on Shanghai.
COMMENTARY
Feb 4, 2008

'Plumpynut' features in malnutrition fight

NEW YORK — The World Health Organization estimates that 20 million children worldwide suffer from severe acute malnutrition right now. This untenable condition leads to a child dying every five seconds in regions such as the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and South Asia, known as the world's "malnutrition...
COMMENTARY
Feb 3, 2008

Election should settle the war question

LOS ANGELES — The current race for the White House might just prove to be a great clarifier on the Iraq war. This is undoubtedly the high-profile foreign-policy problem that the world would like our electoral system to resolve decisively.

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