Search - article

 
 
Reader Mail
Jun 16, 2013

The culture of sexual predation

Paul Gaysford, in his June 6 letter, "Sense of brotherhood toward all" (a response to my May 30 letter, "Myth of the willing prostitute"), avoids the issue at hand.
Japan Times
JAPAN / CHUBU CONNECTION
Jun 15, 2013

Student group helping combat leprosy in India

A group of university students from Nagoya and Tokyo known as Namaste! will begin to provide support to those who have recovered from leprosy in India by selling accessories made by them from Monday in Japan over the Internet.
BUSINESS / YEN FOR LIVING
Jun 13, 2013

Insurance companies main beneficiaries of scheme to protect obstetricians from malpractice suits

Some mothers claim they are overpaying for insurance to protect obstetricians from malpractice suits.
Reader Mail
Jun 13, 2013

Medieval standard of decorum

In the June 4 article, "Rights groups tell Japan to fully tape interrogations of criminal suspects," reporter Tomohiro Osaki notes that "the U.N. Committee against Torture issued a statement pointing out that Japan's criminal justice system should do away with its traditionally strong reliance on confessions...
Reader Mail
Jun 13, 2013

Resourceful ways to kill time

Regarding the June 11 article "Wait a sec: Smartphones helping more in Japan deal with irritatingly long waits, survey says": This survey is weird and interesting. I am amazed at the startling ingenuity of the surveyors concerning the subject matter.
Reader Mail
Jun 13, 2013

Don't suppress children's voices

I would like to give my opinion on the June 4 AFP-JIJI article "Hey kids, keep it down — graying Japan annoyed by children's noise": I am a Japanese-language consultant who has visited Japan five times and been in regular touch with Japanese for 18 years. I keep getting information about concerns that...
Reader Mail
Jun 13, 2013

Hashimoto's distracting hoopla

Regarding the June 7 front-page article "Hashimoto to Abe: Fly Ospreys at Yao" by Eric Johnston: Yao Airport is a general aviation airport (a second-class airport under Japan's aviation law) with two runways that intersect, one 1,490 meters in length and the other 1,200 meters. An aerial photograph shows...
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE FOREIGN ELEMENT
Jun 11, 2013

Japan's Nigerians see symbol of change in masquerade

Anyone wandering the back streets near Omiya Station at 7:20 a.m. on Sunday, June 2, might have passed a particular office building, unremarkable except for two African men standing on a 2nd floor balcony, rope in hand, lowering a car-sized Ugo (eagle) costume down to the parking lot. One of them was...
Japan Times
BUSINESS / Companies
Jun 9, 2013

Dark sides of Toyota's drive to be No. 1

Like most corporate giants, Toyota isn't all squeaky clean. Yet in their book 'Toyota no Shotai' ('The True Colors of Toyota') published in Japanese in 2006, Hajime Yokota and Makoto Sataka catalog the Japanese media's timidity when it comes to covering the nation's top advertiser.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jun 9, 2013

Sifting through the rubble of Hashimoto's political ambitions

In 1995, the late University of Illinois professor David G. Goodman observed that when serious disagreements arise between Japanese people and foreigners, the former invariably internalize the debate among themselves.
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Jun 9, 2013

'Nutritious' claims need to be taken with a pinch of salt

During a recent visit to the United States, I was impressed by several advertising campaigns. The American Beverage Association (ABA) is running a series of spots that alternatingly complain of what it deems the over-regulation of soft drinks and promote the efforts of member manufacturers to make their...
Reader Mail
Jun 9, 2013

Cooperation among past enemies

The June 4 AFP-JIJI article "South Korean president gets baptism by fire" is interesting for many reasons. I lived in a small town in North Korea until the end of 1950. I remember colonial life before 1945.
Reader Mail
Jun 9, 2013

Conditions for a global education

I read with interest Masaaki Kameda's May 29 article, "Education panel touts more global approach." Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's exhortation that Japanese universities establish super-global universities by recruiting faculty staff from overseas, establishing partnerships with overseas universities and...
Japan Times
WORLD
Jun 8, 2013

U.S. taps servers in vast data-mining program

The National Security Agency and FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet firms, extracting audio and video chats, photos, emails, documents and connection logs. U.S. taps firms' servers, mines Internet data
Japan Times
JAPAN / CHUBU CONNECTION
Jun 8, 2013

Mara the elephant slowly gets back on her feet

Treatment for Mara, a baby female elephant with fractures in both of her front legs, continues at the Toyohashi Zoo and Botanical Park in Aichi Prefecture.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 7, 2013

Screen violence is in the eye of the beholder

Some people avoid violent films, while others watch little else. Professional movie reviewers, who may see hundreds of films annually, cannot afford to be so picky. If you are covering the Cannes Film Festival competition, as I did one year for the Screen International daily critics' poll, you cannot...
Japan Times
WORLD / Politics
Jun 6, 2013

Urban shift aided PM but brought corruption

The protests triggered in Turkey by plans to redevelop a park into a shopping mall at first seem an unlikely cause for public anger. In reality, the demonstrations over Taksim Square's Gezi Park go to the very heart of Turkey's modern discontents.
Reader Mail
Jun 6, 2013

Avoiding corporal punishment

Regarding the June 2 article "Severe sports training methods became taibatsu in time": The writer concludes: "The trick is to determine in modern society where hard training ends and assault or violence, which is and always has been a criminal offense in Japan, begins. And that is not an easy thing."...
Reader Mail
Jun 6, 2013

Memories of a Pakistani village

The May 31 AFP-JIJI article "India's Africans keeping ancient customs alive" brought back memories of my visit to two Shidi villages in Sindh province, Pakistan, some years back.
EDITORIALS
Jun 5, 2013

No place for hate speech

In demonstrations repeatedly held in Tokyo's Shin-Okubo district, home to many Korean shops and restaurants, participants have shouted threatening words such as "Kill both good and bad Koreans," "Koreans, get out," and "Sink them in Tokyo Bay."
ASIA PACIFIC / FOCUS
Jun 5, 2013

China constitution debate hits nerve with ruling party

After a country's new leader proclaims the overriding authority of the constitution — a document that guarantees freedom of speech and press — it's worth noting afterward when the same government heavily censors all discussion about that constitution.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE FOREIGN ELEMENT
Jun 4, 2013

As evidence of Agent Orange in Okinawa stacks up, U.S. sticks with blanket denial

In April 2011, these Community pages published the first accounts of sick U.S. veterans who believe their illnesses were caused by exposure to Agent Orange on Okinawa during the Vietnam War era.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 4, 2013

Sunny spin to an oily Earth

Politicians seem to be the last people in the world understanding clean energy or what kind of planet they will bequeath to their grandchildren.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jun 3, 2013

Africa also has stake in UNSC reform: Abe

Japan and African nations must cooperate to push forward United Nations Security Council reform in order to realize better global governance, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Monday at the Tokyo International Conference on African Development.
Japan Times
WORLD / Society
Jun 3, 2013

Join Wall Street, save the world: The rise of the benevolent class

Jason Trigg went into finance because he is after money — as much as he can earn. The 25-year-old certainly had other career options. An MIT computer science graduate, he could write software for the next tech giant. Or he might have gone into academia in computing or applied math or biology. He could...
Reader Mail
Jun 2, 2013

Mayor's unconvincing retort

The May 28 front-page article "Hashimoto looks to deflect sex slave blame" seems to suggest in some way that Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto has a valid point, when it should be made clear that he does not.
Reader Mail
Jun 2, 2013

Wrong address on student letters

Regarding the May 29 Kyodo article "Nagasaki youths key to hibakusha message": Rather than sending their signatures to the United Nations Office in Geneva, the students collecting signatures for the abolition of nuclear weapons should be sending their petition to Washington.
Japan Times
JAPAN / CHUBU CONNECTION
Jun 1, 2013

'Cosplay' summit's characters given life

The first group of official characters to represent this year's World Cosplay Summit was recently revealed. Every year, people from all over the world don costumes worn by their favorite "anime" or TV game characters while attending the event in Nagoya.
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / JAPAN LITE
Jun 1, 2013

Everyone's own path to enlightenment

What is Buddhism?

Longform

Bear attacks have dominated Japanese news headlines in recent months, with 13 people so far having been killed by the animals.
Japan’s bears have been on their killing spree for more than 100 years