What a nest of vipers an office is! Tens, hundreds, thousands of people, supposedly united in a common enterprise — yet if looks could kill, how many would make it alive through the day? Office life seems to present one harassment after another. To pawahara ...
When the political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) visited the infant United States in 1831, he was struck above all by the "equality of condition" that prevailed there. He was a French nobleman with aristocratic biases, but his American observations forced the conclusion on him ...
All cultures present aspects that cannot but baffle the foreign observer. For example: nothing in the native tradition equips a Japanese to grasp the concept of the blood of the crucified son of the one God washing believers clean of sin. The foreign observer of ...
Japan's first convenience store was not, as many suppose, 7-Eleven in Tokyo in 1974 but Mitsui in Kyoto in 1673. The genius behind it was Mitsui Hachirobei, heir to the sake shop his father had opened a generation earlier. Of samurai birth, the father saw ...
"Confucianism," says historian Hiroshi Watanabe, "is perhaps the most powerful political ideology yet conceived by the human race." Really? Indisputably, a set of doctrines associated with an ancient Chinese sage known in the West as Confucius (551-479 B.C.) held sway over much of East Asia for ...
Adolf Hitler is like that bad tooth you can't keep your tongue off, though it hurts to touch it. Seventy-two years postwar, he keeps surfacing. He fascinates. All the way up and all the way down the age scale — from Deputy Prime Minister ...
Try defining "happiness." "A state of well-being and contentment," says Merriam-Webster's dictionary, unhelpfully. It's like saying happiness is happiness. Indefinable it may be, but we all know it when we feel it. Whatever it is, there's nothing better, and everything we do we do for ...
You could spend your entire life in modern Japan without ever hearing the term wabi, though no overview of Japanese history or art is complete without it. It's a beautiful word, hard to define like most beautiful words. Poverty is the heart of ...
Human beings are born amoral. Infants know no rules, and obey none. They learn a few at home, then go to school and learn more. Everyone agrees rules are necessary. On what the rules should be there is less agreement; less still on ...
"In Japan today, talking about death is taboo," Kobe University medical professor Yoshiyuki Kizawa told the Asahi Shimbun earlier this month. It is remarkable that this should be so. Japan of all nations should be primed for such a discussion. Its traditional culture is breathtakingly ...
