Search - question

 
 
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 4, 2014

Is the U.K.-Europe marriage beyond salvation?

The nomination of a 'federalist' to head the European Commission shows that the EU is institutionally dedicated to the idea of ever closer union, regardless of what its citizens, especially Britons, actually want.
WORLD
Jul 4, 2014

Queen Elizabeth names Britain's biggest warship

Queen Elizabeth will officially name the biggest warship Britain has ever built on Friday, the latest step in a 6.2 billion pound ($10.6 billion) project to build a new generation of aircraft carriers.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 3, 2014

China's reach for leverage

China's random and sporadic acts of provocations over territorial disputes seem to fail to intimidate its opponents in the Asia-Pacific region, but each push and probe tests retaliatory assets and calls into question the U.S. capacity, and will, to come to the aid of a beleaguered ally.
Japan Times
JAPAN
Jul 3, 2014

While Japan presses North on abductions, South Korea victims are forgotten

Kim Young-nam was a teenager living on the coast of South Korea when he disappeared in 1978, only to turn up in North Korea. There, he met and married Megumi Yokota, a Japanese national abducted by North Korean agents on her way home from school a year earlier.
JAPAN / Politics
Jul 2, 2014

U.S. hails defense revamp

Tuesday's decision by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Cabinet to reinterpret the Constitution to allow collective self-defense has divided Japan, with some people fearing it would drag the nation into a U.S.-led war.
JAPAN
Jul 2, 2014

Evacuation plans stir fresh doubts over Japan nuclear restarts

Keen to restart nuclear power plants three years after the Fukushima disaster, authorities may face an additional hurdle in securing approval — coming up with a cogent evacuation plan in the event of new accidents.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 2, 2014

Babylon still trembles at Jamaica's cult classic

Flashback: It's midnight at the Orson Welles Cinema, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980. Perry Henzell's breakthrough Jamaican film "The Harder They Come" has been playing here every weekend for nearly a decade now, but tonight it's still a full house. As the lights go down, the audience sparks up, and within...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 2, 2014

'Nanpu (Riding the Breeze)'

Movies about women who fly off to foreign climes to reboot their lives are a thriving subgenre, though the heroines are mostly from well-off countries, Japan included. Women from the more troubled parts of the world may also cross borders to start new lives, but their motives are less often self-discovery...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 2, 2014

High-energy Ono conducts a rare 'Hoffmann' critique

He is known best for the rapturously hysterical "Infernal Gallop" (aka "The Can-can") from his 1858 operetta "Orpheus in the Underworld," but the German-born, naturalized-French composer Jacques Offenbach (1819-80) is credited with just one full-length, serious opera — "The Tales of Hoffmann" — which...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 2, 2014

Son's film reveals secret workings of stage maestro Peter Brook's art

Peter Brook is a titan in the world of theater. Now aged 89, the director staged his first work, Christopher Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus," in 1942. After a groundbreaking stint at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s, in 1970 the London-born director co-founded the International Centre for Theatre...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 2, 2014

History moves, but not always ahead

Victors of World War II find themselves unable to win the wars they wage against peasant societies. They combine self-righteousness with the perception of failure and decline.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 1, 2014

GM is no transformer and that's the problem

General Motors' inability to look outside of itself for talent, relying on company lifers even in the face of undeniable evidence of deep cultural rot, is what you'd expect from a corporation for which sponsoring a movie about car-robots from outer space seems to count as a meaningful step toward actual transformation.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 1, 2014

Time to say goodbye to the business cycle?

The many failures of economics before, during and after the recent financial crisis have left an intellectual vacuum. It seems that governments' past success in stabilizing the economy in the short run encouraged too much debt and instability in the long term.
JAPAN / Politics
Jun 30, 2014

Ishin-Komeito ties fray in Osaka

Relations between Nippon Ishin no Kai (Japan Restoration Party) and New Komeito continue to deteriorate, with party heads Toru Hashimoto and Ichiro Matsui preparing to challenge two Osaka-based New Komeito leaders in the next Lower House election.
Japan Times
WORLD / Politics / ANALYSIS
Jun 30, 2014

Despite wowing West, Ukraine leader dependent on Putin

Three weeks into his job, President Petro Poroshenko looks like a man in a hurry.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 30, 2014

Who'll pay for the Iraq sins?

Will the purveyors of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq ever do penance for their sins of warmongering?
Japan Times
ASIA PACIFIC / Society
Jun 30, 2014

China suffers karoshi, as white-collar workers die from overwork

Chinese banking regulator Li Jianhua literally worked himself to death. After 26 years of "always putting the cause of the party and the people" first, his employer said this month, the 48-year-old official died rushing to finish a report before the sun came up.
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
Jun 28, 2014

Sexist remarks seen through a clouded lens

It's assumed that the heckling of Tokyo assembly member Ayaka Shiomura by some of her male colleagues on June 18 became a major news story in Japan only after the foreign press picked it up as an example of intractable Japanese sexism. The situation is more nuanced than how Western media described it,...
COMMENTARY / Japan / COUNTERPOINT
Jun 28, 2014

Abe's nuclear renaissance ignores stiff opposition

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's nuclear renaissance involves downplaying risks, restarting reactors, building new ones, and exporting reactor technology and equipment. A number of hurdles remain before he can rev up the reactors, but the summer of 2014 will probably be Japan's last nuclear-free one for decades...
JAPAN / Politics
Jun 27, 2014

Collective defense deal near

The ruling coalition closes in on three new standards that would let the Japanese military use force in cases other than when Japan is under attack.
SOCCER / PREMIER REPORT
Jun 27, 2014

Outlook grim for England following debacle in Brazil

I have rarely been so pessimistic about the future of the England national team.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Jun 27, 2014

'Reinterpreting' Article 9 endangers Japan's rule of law

The most serious problem with the recommendations of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's advisory panel on reinterpreting Article 9 of the Consititution is that they reflect a result-oriented analysis driven by national security imperatives rather than constitutional law principles.
EDITORIALS
Jun 27, 2014

Legal tussle over parental ties

Japan's Supreme Court next month is scheduled to hear two cases that challenge the traditional legal presumption of a father-child relationship when DNA test results deny the existence of blood ties.
Japan Times
BUSINESS / Companies
Jun 26, 2014

Tepco shrugs off activist investors

Tokyo Electric Power Co. shot down a bevy of anti-nuclear policy proposals lobbed up by irate shareholders at its annual meeting Thursday in Tokyo and vowed instead to restart its idled reactors.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 26, 2014

Deceptive labor shortages

Is Japan experiencing a real economic recovery or an attempt by the Abe administration to cheer people up with the appearance of lively labor markets?
Japan Times
LIFE / Food & Drink
Jun 26, 2014

Beer garden season begins with a hearty 'kanpai'

When the first Biergarten (beer gardens) started popping up in Germany's Bavarian region in the late 19th century, who would've thought that they would one day come to represent summer in Japan. Well, I guess it's not that unbelievable.
JAPAN / Society
Jun 25, 2014

Sexist slurs present chance to improve decorum in politics

Discriminatory remarks in the assembly hall aren't rare in the world of Japanese politics, but a recent incident involving sexist slurs may offer the chance to end a shameful tradition.

Longform

Sumadori Bar on Shibuya Ward's main Center Gai street targets young customers who prefer low-alcohol drinks or abstain altogether.
Rethinking that second drink: Japan’s Gen Z gets ‘sober curious’