Tag - democracy

 
Menu
Search
 
June 07, 2025
 

Today's print edition

Home Delivery
Subscribe for more access

DEMOCRACY

Security personnel keep watch near the portrait of late Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong displayed on the Tiananmen Gate, in Beijing on Tuesday.
ASIA PACIFIC / Politics
Jun 4, 2025
We will never forget Tiananmen crackdown, Taiwan and U.S. say on 36th anniversary
The events are not publicly discussed in China and the anniversary is not officially marked.
A vehicle exits Shek Pik Prison after former leader of the Civil Human Rights Front, Jimmy Sham, served a four-year, three-month sentence for conspiracy to commit subversion in a landmark national security case, in Hong Kong, on Friday.
ASIA PACIFIC / Crime & Legal
May 30, 2025
Second group of Hong Kong democrats freed after 4 years in jail
Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ+ activist Jimmy Sham, who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups.
A woman casts her early vote for the upcoming South Korean presidential election at a polling station in Seoul on Thursday.
WORLD / Politics
May 29, 2025
How a Gen Z gender divide is reshaping democracy
Many angry, frustrated men in their 20s were seen breaking to the right in recent elections spanning North America, Europe and Asia.
The Chinese Communist Party has significantly expanded its global influence operations by using tactics like election interference, disinformation, elite capture and pressure on the diaspora to sway politics and policies in democracies worldwide.
COMMENTARY / World
May 28, 2025
Is Beijing engineering election wins for 'soft on China' politicians?
Beijing legally requires all citizens to support Communist Party policies and views ethnic Chinese everywhere as instruments for advancing its global goals.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempt to punish Harvard by targeting its international students is an unconstitutional power grab aimed at intimidating free institutions and advancing his authoritarian agenda.
COMMENTARY / World
May 25, 2025
Harvard is fighting for much more than foreign students
Trump is trying to break the world’s leading university because he knows that higher education — everywhere — is one of the bulwarks of a free society.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in parliament in Budapest on Tuesday. Critics have likened recent moves by the prime minister to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to crack down on domestic rivals.
WORLD / Politics
May 20, 2025
Viktor Orban tightens grip on freedoms in Hungary ahead of election next year
Over the past 15 years, the premier has expelled a university, overhauled the judiciary and whipped up propaganda campaigns against political opponents.
A car with curtains drawn, one of two, is seen leaving Hong Kong's Shek Pik prison just before sunrise on Tuesday.
ASIA PACIFIC / Politics
Apr 29, 2025
First batch of Hong Kong democrats freed after four years in jail
Four former pro-democracy lawmakers, including Claudia Mo, Kwok Ka-ki, Jeremy Tam and Gary Fan, were driven away from three separate prisons across Hong Kong around dawn.
Trumpism is attacking America's core institutions to gain unchecked power, and only a united civic uprising that defends and reforms these institutions can stop it and build a better future.
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 27, 2025
Time for a civic uprising
What’s happening is not normal. America needs an uprising that is not normal.
Lower House lawmaker Kai Odake in his Tokyo office on Wednesday
JAPAN / Politics / FOCUS
Apr 21, 2025
Is Japan’s parliament ready to welcome more youth to its ranks?
Among the world’s largest democracies, Japan has some of the highest minimum age requirements for politicians.
A wave of fear is spreading in immigrant communities as ICE uses secretive, aggressive tactics, bypassing legal protections and spreading panic reminiscent of authoritarian crackdowns.
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 14, 2025
Unmarked vans and secret lists. The police state has arrived.
"It’s the unmarked cars,” a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship said. He had watched the video of Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction. In the video, which Khalil’s wife recorded, she asks for the names of the men in plainclothes who handcuffed her husband.
Lo Kin-hei (center), chairman of the Democratic Party, attends a news conference after an extraordinary general meeting to seek members' views on the potential dissolution of the party in Hong Kong on Sunday.
ASIA PACIFIC / Politics
Apr 14, 2025
Hong Kong's last major opposition party moves toward disbanding
The head of the Democratic Party says 90% of its 110 members had voted for disbandment arrangements to begin, followed by a final vote in the coming months.
Hong Kong's real estate sector is slumping, putting the government's development plans at risk and signaling a wider economic malaise that may become a spanner in the works of Beijing's plans to transform the territory's economy.
COMMENTARY / World / Geoeconomic Briefing
Apr 7, 2025
Will China succeed in remaking Hong Kong in its own image?
Beijing can control Hong Kong politically, but to impose its economic vision on the territory it needs businesses to get on board as these face an economic and real estate plunge.
President Donald Trump outside the White House in Washington on Thursday. The 22nd Amendment is clear: President Trump has to give up his office after his second term. But his refusal to accept that underscores how far he is willing to consider going to consolidate power.
WORLD / Politics
Apr 7, 2025
Trump's third term talk defies constitution and tests democracy
The fact that Trump has inserted the idea into the national conversation illustrates the uncertainty about the future of America’s constitutional system.
On April 23, 1925, The Japan Times ran a story about the principal clauses of the new Peace Preservation Law that was enacted to suppress ideologies deemed dangerous by the state.
JAPAN / History / Japan Times Gone By
Apr 5, 2025
Japan Times 1925: Peace law has several teeth
The Peace Preservation Law was a means of ideological suppression that grew tighter over time until it was repealed by Allied authorities following World War II.
Demonstrators gather in front of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, on Thursday, during a rally in support of Istanbul's arrested mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, the main political rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 28, 2025
Inside Turkey’s executive coup
After 23 years in power, and with Turkey’s economy collapsing, Erdogan knows that no election — even a rigged one — is safe.
There is concern about a severe decline in democracy in Asia, with many former success stories now backsliding.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 27, 2025
An Asian democracy collapse amid the new world order
By the monitoring organization Freedom House's calculations, for 19 years, democracy has eroded around the world.
Voters believe they are active participants in democracies, but the real power is concentrated in the hands of the few.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 12, 2025
Social media and playing at democracy
Voters believe they are active participants in democracies, but the real power is concentrated in the hands of the few.
Hong Kong activist Tang Ngok-kwan speaks to reporters in Hong Kong on Thursday after the Court of Final Appeal ruled in his favor and quashed his jail term for refusing to hand over information to the city's national security police.
ASIA PACIFIC / Politics
Mar 6, 2025
Hong Kong’s Tiananmen activists win rare appeal in security case
The ruling marked a rare victory in challenging the enforcement of the national security law imposed by Beijing.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance and wife Usha stand in front of an iron gate with the slogan "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work will set you free") as they arrive for a tour of the Dachau Concentration Camp memorial site in southern Germany on Feb. 13.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 27, 2025
Without America, ‘the West’ will splinter, wither and die
Trump and his movement do not share similar values, at least not unequivocally, and that is now sinking in across the rest of the West, which the U.S. has led for eight decades.
Lo Kin-hei (center), chairman of Hong Kong's Democratic Party, along with other senior leaders, announced Thursday that it will start preparations to wind down operations.
ASIA PACIFIC / Politics
Feb 21, 2025
Hong Kong's oldest pro-democracy party prepares to shut down
The Democratic Party's fortunes declined after Beijing tightened its grip and imposed a national security law.
Japan eyes tougher rules for foreign residents and tax hike for tourists
A tax-free shop in Kyoto in April 2024. Last week, members of a Liberal Democratic Party study group drafted a proposal seeking to scrap the country's tax-free shopping system altogether.
From ridicule to redemption: Rice crisis returns Koizumi to the spotlight
Agriculture minister Shinjiro Koizumi speaks to the media as he inspects a warehouse storing stockpiled rice in Kanagawa Prefecture on May 30.
Hakuho’s departure highlights worrying sumo trend
Former <i>yokozuna</i> Hakuho performs a ring-entering ceremony at the Ryogoku Kokugikan in Tokyo in February 2020.
Trump and Musk trade barbs on social media as alliance crumbles
The trouble between U.S. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk started brewing days ago, when Musk denounced Trump's sweeping tax-cut and spending bill.
How Japan's youth are slowly changing the country's work ethic
After the asset-price bubble crash of the early 1990s, employment at a Japanese company was no longer necessarily for life. As a result, a new generation is less willing to endure a toxic work culture —life’s too short, after all.
New Naoshima museum bets on Asia, not the West
Detail of Takashi Murakami, “Rakuchu-Rakugai-zu Byobu: Iwasa Matabei RIP” (2023-25)
Japan’s prison reform focuses on rehabilitation
Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki speaks to reporters in Tokyo on Friday. Suzuki said preparations for the changes that will focus more on rehabilitation are being actively made at each correctional facility.
Six months into 2025, J-pop is having a full-on identity crisis (and a great time)
The year so far is only proving that Mrs. Green Apple is the biggest band in Japan. Their success also seems to be hinting at a change in the musical landscape more broadly.
Nintendo’s Switch 2 console is finally here
The Switch 2 is Nintendo's first new gaming console in eight years.
Hakuho’s departure highlights worrying sumo trend
Former <i>yokozuna</i> Hakuho performs a ring-entering ceremony at the Ryogoku Kokugikan in Tokyo in February 2020.

Podcast

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.
Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Longform

After the asset-price bubble crash of the early 1990s, employment at a Japanese company was no longer necessarily for life. As a result, a new generation is less willing to endure a toxic work culture —life’s too short, after all.
How Japan's youth are slowly changing the country's work ethic
By Alex K.T. Martin

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Ishii Iron Works remakes self for workers, new energy
Ishii Iron Works remakes self for workers, new energy

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTS note

Read more

SUPPLEMENTS BINDER