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COMMENTARY
Dec 5, 2012

American colleges have free speech on the run

In 2007, Keith John Sampson, a middle-aged student working his way through Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis as a janitor, was declared guilty of racial harassment. Without granting Sampson a hearing, the university administration — acting as prosecutor, judge and jury — convicted...
JAPAN / ELECTION 2012
Dec 2, 2012

Abe's rightism: Campaign ploy or governance plan?

The main election slogan of the Liberal Democratic Party, which polls say will prevail in the Dec. 16 general election, is "Restoring Japan," underlining its determination to reclaim the power it lost three years ago.
JAPAN
Nov 14, 2012

Tokyo wary of looming Beijing helm change

China is on the verge of installing a new leader, presumably Vice President Xi Jingping, to lead the nation for the coming decade at a time when its economy and society are showing strains and its growing military expansion and tensions with its neighbors, particularly Japan, are promising turbulence...
COMMUNITY / Voices / HAVE YOUR SAY
Nov 6, 2012

Revisionists, the Senkakus and Debito: readers' views

Some readers' letters in response to Debito Arudou's Oct. 2 Just Be Cause column, "Revisionists marching Japan back to a dangerous place":
EDITORIALS
Nov 3, 2012

Has Mr. Berlusconi's luck run out?

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been found guilty of tax fraud and sentenced to four years in prison. Incredibly for a leader of a Group of Eight nation, this is not Mr. Berlusconi's first conviction — he has been found guilty in three other unrelated trials — nor might it be...
COMMENTARY
Sep 26, 2012

Why shouldn't pols treat voters like grownups?

In every year divisible by four, the dominant superstition of American politics — faith in the magic of presidential words and deeds — reaches an apogee that feeds national narcissism: Everything that happens anywhere is about us, is a response to something America did or did not do, and can be controlled...
CULTURE / Books
Sep 16, 2012

The long tradition of sanitizing history

Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World, by John W. Dower. New Press, 2012, 336 pp., $26.95 (hardcover) Toru Hashimoto, mayor of Osaka and leader of the Nippon Ishin-no Kai, recently tried to revise the history of comfort women, saying that there is no evidence that the Japanese...
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Sep 2, 2012

Will the Takeshima dispute break the Korean wave?

"There's something sad, when a political problem goes so far as to spill over to the entertainment industry," rues journalist Kaoru Kikuchi in Sunday Mainichi (Sep. 9).
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 20, 2012

Why do American junk food giants feel the urge to force-feed us tidbit sermons on social issues?

Since when does serving up junk food give someone a license to preach?
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jul 22, 2012

Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto: 'What Japan needs now is dictatorship'

Confrontational, outspoken, feisty and highly focused, Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto is a self-made man determined to redraw the loci of power in Japan. He is clearly using the local platform from which to spring into the national arena. The question on everyone's mind is: Will Hashimoto ever be the prime...
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
Jul 15, 2012

Shades of Meiji surround provincial Hashimoto's growing national profile

First of two parts
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / BIG IN JAPAN
Jun 3, 2012

Hashimoto: A man with a plan, or dictator with an agenda?

Thirty years ago, while a program director at NHK, Nobuo Ikeda oversaw a panel discussion on the merits of adopting a federated political system. Among the panelists were several influential politicians, including Morihiro Hosokawa, then-governor of Kumamoto Prefecture and later prime minister, and Takahiro...
COMMENTARY / World
May 30, 2012

Citizens are main stakeholders in rebuilding global governance

The Council on Foreign Relations, a leading U.S. foreign policy institute and publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine, this spring launched a network of the world's influential policy institutes. The initiative aims at creating a forum for serious discussion among policy researchers to address pressing...
Reader Mail
May 10, 2012

Due process of lese-majeste law

Regarding Pavin Chachavalpongpun's May 3 article, "If you don't think the king deserves to be feted, don't say so in Thailand": I wish to impress upon readers the following points:
Japan Times
JAPAN / Media / MEDIA MIX
May 6, 2012

'Hidden children' of politicians no hurdle to success

Democratic Party of Japan kingpin Ichiro Ozawa was acquitted last week of conspiring to file false financial reports for his political group. He can now return full-time to the job he was elected to do, but the sense you get from the mainstream media is that he's through as a politician. The press has...
COMMENTARY
May 3, 2012

Costs of being too responsive to the public will

The Washington of conventional wisdom and the real Washington are two entirely different places.
Japan Times
LIFE
Mar 11, 2012

Young hopes bloom eternal

The first anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake is a time to commemorate the victims of that terrible tragedy. But it is also an opportunity to look to the future.
Reader Mail
Feb 23, 2012

Unbearable cost of Iranian oil

With increasing international momentum for an oil boycott on Iran in light of the Tehran regime's relentless pursuit of nuclear energy capability, Japan's leaders must pause and reflect on the unbearable cost of Iranian oil. By cost, I am not referring exclusively to yen and rials, but to the political,...
JAPAN
Feb 3, 2012

How far can Hashimoto ride wave?

Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto's political fortunes in and out of Osaka continue to rise, as a growing number of local- and national-level politicians seek his cooperation to form what could well be the ruling coalition after the next Lower House election.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 2, 2012

What does Egypt's military leadership want?

"Whatever the majority in the People's Assembly, they are very welcome, because they won't have the ability to impose anything that the people don't want."
Japan Times
COMMENTARY
Jan 25, 2012

Conversations with Thaksin, Thailand's prime suspect

THE SHOCKING COUP: "The situation is no good." "It's just a matter of time," a top minister had told him. "We only have a few weeks left before they act." Another had told him: "Our days are numbered."
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 3, 2012

EU must stop pretending it can change Russia

The post-Cold War order in Europe is finished, with Vladimir Putin its executioner. Russia's withdrawal from the Treaty of Conventional Forces, its deliberate efforts to block the election monitoring of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and the Kremlin's refusal to ratify...
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 19, 2011

Obama could learn from LBJ's leadership style

Without presidential leadership in the trenches, there is no chance that Congress, particularly a divided Congress, will step on the third-rail politics of raising taxes or cutting popular programs such as Medicare, much less deploy the federal government to reduce the number of Americans living in poverty....
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 24, 2011

Lack of leadership hobbles Egypt's revolution

The man who taught me to sacrifice my heart for Egypt is dead," said Vivian Magdi, mourning her fiancé. Michael Mosad was killed in the Maspiro area Oct. 9, when an armored vehicle hit him during a protest called to condemn an attack on an Egyptian Church in the southern Aswan region. The protest left...
BUSINESS
Nov 1, 2011

Japan needs a 'fresh start' to resolve lingering issues

Post-March 11 Japan faces the challenge of not just rebuilding from the damage of the massive earthquake and tsunami, but also tackling the nation's structural economic and political problems that have largely been left unresolved over the past two decades.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / LIGHT GIST
Sep 27, 2011

No-nos for Noda: Japan's top 10 most useless PMs

On Sept. 2, Yoshihiko Noda was appointed the 95th prime minister of Japan, the sixth man (and they have all been men) to hold the job in five years. To mark this occasion and offer lessons to the new Democratic Party of Japan chief on how not to lead the country, the Community Page asked 10 writers to...
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 20, 2011

Osama bin Laden made news, not history

Ten years after 9/11, the instant history is being written. In the French newspaper Le Monde, a highly intelligent commemorative supplement dubbed the period "The Decade of Bin Laden." But is that right?
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 10, 2011

Are sanctions helping to build Iran's bomb?

For years it was assumed that economic sanctions and diplomacy would produce a pliable negotiating partner in Iran. But Iran's truculence has effectively undermined the once-popular notion, while a degree of confusion and consternation has gripped the international community. The often-unstated hope...
EDITORIALS
Jul 22, 2011

A killing in Kandahar

The murder of Ahmed Wali Karzai, the so-called "King of Kandahar," creates a power vacuum in a key political stronghold in Afghanistan. Karzai was the half-brother of President Hamid Karzai, and a pillar of the president's authority. His death creates uncertainty for the Kabul government as it contemplates...

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