He's young, photogenic, energetic, brash, bold, intelligent — and, almost oxymoronically, a politician, one of very few in Japan within living memory who come close to fitting such a description. He has many ideas, all of which boil down to this: "Nihon no kuni ...
Japan's decline has no historical parallel. It is a current fed by two streams — economic and demographic. Economically, barring an unforeseen upsurge, gross domestic product is forecast to fall 16 percent by 2025, 42 percent by 2050. Demographically, in 50 years there will ...
AINU SPIRITS SINGING: The Living World of Chiri Yukie's Ainu Shinyoshu, By Sarah M. Strong. University Of Hawaii Press, 2011, 314 pp., $58.00 (hardcover) "In the past this spacious Hokkaido was our ancestors' world of freedom. Living with ease and pleasure in the manner of ...
Japan's rather tepid sex life of late has drawn considerable attention, not so much prurient as anxious. What does it mean when young people in their sexual prime are bored by sex or can't be bothered with it? The implications are various: psychological (has ...
'Hirata Makoto desu. Shuttō shite kimashita." (「平田信です。出頭してきました」"I am Makoto Hirata. I've come to give myself up"). Sure you are! said the first officer he spoke to, in effect. He thought it was an akushitsu na itazura (悪質ないたずら, a malicious prank). Never mind that Hirata was ...
Who can contemplate a newborn infant unmoved by its helplessness? Few living things are as vulnerable; none for anywhere near as long. Far beyond infancy, into childhood and adolescence, human beings are, if not utterly at the mercy of circumstances beyond their control, at ...
Yubari, Hokkaido, claims several distinctions, few of them enviable. It is Japan's only bankrupt city, and also its most elderly. Forty-one percent of its sagging population of 13,000 (down from 117,000 50 years ago) is aged 65 or over. That's of nationwide significance because ...
A Japanese journalist in Cuba sees decaying buildings and undernourished citizens and wonders, "Why aren't these people depressed? Why, on the contrary, do they seem positively happy?" She asks around: "What's the secret?" To which one wag replies, "There's no order-in pizza here; we ...
FIGHTING SPIRIT: The Memoirs of Major Yoshitaka Horie and the Battle of Iwo Jima. Edited by Robert D. Eldridge and Charles W. Tatum. Naval Institute Press, 2011, 224 pp., $26.95 (hardcover) Iwo Jima is a tiny sliver of an island 1,200 km south of Tokyo, ...
"Whatever happens won't be strange." Thus the weekly Shukan Gendai sums up the prospects for the year now dawning. Shaken by 2011, we face the blank slate that is 2012. Mankind's history of trying to read the future is very long. We've sought clues in animal ...
