Search - politics

 
 
COMMENTARY / Japan
Mar 18, 2015

Toyota's measly wage increase won't help turn Japan around

The government should reengage in old-fashion industrial policy to force companies into being more generous.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 18, 2015

Why Czar Vladimir Putin is always correct

Russians have endured some of the worst despots in history, yet they have a near-apocalyptic fear of change of power.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 18, 2015

The real lesson from the Clinton email imbroglio

The flap over Hillary Clinton's use of private email reflects the tension between the drive for transparency and the instinct for privacy.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Mar 17, 2015

Investor Dan Loeb takes on Japan's mega-bot

Hedge-fund manager Dan Loeb's budding success with Fanuc hints change may be afoot in corporate Japan.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / Japan
Mar 17, 2015

Taxpayers shouldn't fund war on Asahi Shimbun

The Abe administration's 'kulturekampf' against Asahi Shimbun makes it look like the Chinese Communist Party in its hostility to a free press.
EDITORIALS
Mar 17, 2015

GOP blunders into foreign policy

A letter by 47 U.S. Republican senators to the government of Iran has exposed them as irresponsible amateurs in the practice of foreign policy.
Japan Times
ASIA PACIFIC
Mar 17, 2015

Myanmar's student protesters at odds with old guard as reforms stall

Kyaw Min Yu's first political rally was almost his last.
COMMUNITY / Voices / FOREIGN AGENDA
Mar 16, 2015

Japanese activists fight against the tide to save whales and dolphins

Homegrown foes of dolphin hunts and 'research whaling' face off against a daunting array of powerful interests.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 16, 2015

Corruption threatens to implode Bangladesh

With bomb explosions almost taking the life of the prime minister, the opposition leader charged with murder, and violent protests and arson sweeping the capital, Bangladesh again seems poised at the edge of an abyss.
CULTURE / Books / ESSENTIAL READING FOR JAPANOPHILES
Mar 14, 2015

A Personal Matter

In the 1960s, Kenzaburo Oe began regularly writing about a character based on his autistic son, Hikari.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Mar 13, 2015

It's time to punish Tepco

Four years on, it's still not clear whether Tokyo Electrip Power Co. has learned anything, or why Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has not demanded accountability from the company tht gave the world its worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 12, 2015

Asian airlines are running out of trained pilots

Asia's aviation market is booming, but the supply of pilots isn't keeping pace with the demand for flights. It's time that aviation companies in the West lend Asian airlines and governments a hand.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Mar 12, 2015

The persevering existence of On Kawara

Last summer, the Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara passed away at age 81. Having lived in New York since 1965, it is unsurprising that the Guggenheim honors Kawara with the first comprehensive retrospective of his work — an exhibition that Kawara himself helped organize.
Japan Times
WORLD
Mar 12, 2015

Politics intrude as cybersecurity firms hunt for spies

The $71 billion cybersecurity industry is fragmenting along geopolitical lines as firms chase after government contracts, share information with spy agencies, and market themselves as protectors against attacks by other nations.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Mar 10, 2015

Three reasons why Japan will get more stimulus

With no sign that Japan's economy is on the path of a self-sustaining recovery, a third dose of quantitative easing is almost certain.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 10, 2015

Why Nemtsov's death got pinned on Chechens

The shooting of a Putin opponent by an underling of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has probably brought the sovereign and vassal closer together.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 10, 2015

Netanyahu hit by a perfect storm

The upcoming Israeli election will almost certainly prove to be much closer than what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ever imagined it would be.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 9, 2015

Netanyahu's 'wolf' refrain tests longtime ties with U.S.

By trying to bury a proposed nuclear deal with Iran in front of the U.S. Congress, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put the most critical Israeli relationship at risk.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Mar 9, 2015

It's time for troubled Sharp to sink or swim

Continuing to prop up complacent Japanese companies deadens the creative destruction that chastens stagnant industries and makes way for innovative and new ones.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Mar 7, 2015

The problems and pleasure of publishing the horrors of the 3/11 tsunami

At a symposium on "Trauma and Utopia" held in Tokyo in October 2014, photographer Naoya Hatakeyama talked about his work in the aftermath of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, a disaster that killed his mother and destroyed his home in Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture. During this, he acknowledged...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books / ESSENTIAL READING FOR JAPANOPHILES
Mar 7, 2015

An Artist of the Floating World

Released in 1986, this relatively short novel is dense with ideas and possibilities. Set in Japan in the late 1940s, the story is narrated by Masuji Ono, a celebrated painter who once created propaganda for the Imperial Army. He now finds himself labeled a traitor by the younger generation, a reputation...
Reader Mail
Mar 7, 2015

Communication ban shortsighted

Regarding the editorial "Teachers, pupils": Without a doubt, there are sexual predators teaching children in Japan. But to ban essential communication between honest educators and their charges because of the dishonest ones is shortsighted.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Politics
Mar 6, 2015

Laos' Thongsing meets with Abe, vows to deepen ties with Japan

The visiting prime minister of Laos pledged on Friday to further develop bilateral ties with Japan amid increasing interest from Japanese companies.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 6, 2015

The economic target China should have set

If Chinese leaders are serious about shifting to an economic growth model driven by consumer demand, they need to focus on raising incomes as broadly as possible.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 6, 2015

Netanyahu plays the security card

Israelis really don't need proof that the Iranians are actually working on nuclear weapons. Their anxiety on the issue is so deeply rooted that it resists all the reassurances by Israel's own military and intelligence communities that Iran is not working on such weapons.
EDITORIALS
Mar 6, 2015

A brutal murder in Moscow

The assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov last week shows that Nemtsov himself might have overestimated the state of affairs when he said in an interview the day before his death that Russia's opposition was at the absolute low point.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 6, 2015

Little Estonia did its post-Soviet homework

There aren't many European leaders who take a harder line on Russian President Vladimir Putin's aggression in Ukraine than Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. But Ilves' sympathy for Ukraine is tempered by his belief that it didn't do enough in advance to protect itself.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Mar 4, 2015

John Caird delivers home truths with 'Twelfth Night'

As an Honorary Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, John Caird may be one of the leading pillars of the English theater establishment, but in a recent interview with The Japan Times, this acclaimed director of plays, musicals and opera declared, "In a sense, some part of me is becoming...
Japan Times
BUSINESS / Economy
Mar 4, 2015

Chinese desire for fancy toilet seats spurs 1,400% rally in Laox shares

Thousand-dollar rice cookers and toilet seats that know when you enter the room.
WORLD / Politics
Mar 3, 2015

Obama says Iran must halt key nuclear work for at least a decade

Iran must commit to a verifiable freeze of at least 10 years on sensitive nuclear activity for a landmark atomic deal to be reached, but the odds are still against sealing a final agreement, U.S. President Barack Obama said on Monday.

Longform

An illustration features the Japanese signs for "ganbare" (good luck) and the Deaflympics, which will be held between Nov. 15 and 26.
A century of Deaf sport finds its moment in Tokyo