There was no nonsense about the 1990s in Japan. The economy had crashed, the bubble had burst. "The age of human relationships is over," declared a corporate executive to Aera magazine in 1996, defending the cost-cutting layoffs then gathering speed. "This is the era ...
I am a very trusting fellow. When I cross the street I trust the driver of the approaching vehicle to suppress whatever rage or hatred my appearance may inspire and not mow me down. I walk down the street trusting those within knife-range not ...
'The Creation of the Soul of Japan" is how Donald Keene, the eminent Japanologist, subtitled his 2003 biography of 15th-century shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa. What is the soul of Japan? Tea, flowers, noh drama, simplicity, suggestiveness. War too — but Yoshimasa had no taste for ...
Take a wild guess: Who's the second most influential management guru in Japan, after — it almost goes without saying — Peter Drucker? Hint: He's been dead 2,500 years. He's Chinese. No, not Confucius. (Twenty years ago it might have been.) Give up? Sun Tzu ...
It's hard to read Spa! magazine without feeling that something is dreadfully wrong with Japan. Week after week, it pursues themes that soon grow familiar: hopeless poverty, pointless toil, unrelieved loneliness. In just one issue this month (Sept. 6) it tackles, in separate articles, ...
Why not fascism? Japan was sinking into chaos. "Officer ..." An old woman enters the police station. Would the officers kindly help her find her lost daughter? Foster-daughter, actually. With gruff sympathy, the constables hear her out. They are moved by how far she has walked — ...
A computer's victory over a human go master this past March reminds us of the pending "singularity" — the rapidly approaching moment in time when artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence. Machines will learn, and we won't be their teachers. Are we prepared for it? ...
The wartime moral ideal was blind obedience and self-sacrificing devotion to the nation. Could the upgrading of moral education be a first step on the road back to that?
Illness we share with our ancestors. Diagnosis and remedies set us and them apart. Imagine yourself a Kyoto noble 1,000-odd years ago. You're feeling unwell. "One of two things," you muse to yourself, "either my yin-yang balance is upset, or ..." The second possibility makes ...
Real life is getting too absurd for absurd theater — or so reckons one absurdist playwright. Does he have a point?
