"Can you imagine how it feels for an innocent man to be kept in prison for years?" demanded Govinda Prasad Mainali during a Japan Times interview in November 2003. He'd been in prison six years then. He's still there. Perhaps not for much longer. No one ...
Post-nuclear Japan? Probably not any time soon, but Naoto Kan last month became Japan's first prime minister ever to take a step in that direction. He said: "Genpatsu ni izon shinai shakai wo mezasubeki da" ("原発に依存しない社会を目指すべきだ, We should aim to be a society that does ...
"How wonderful! How marvelous! From here to the southeast is what the Westerners call the Pacific Ocean and the American states! They must be very close!" — Watanabe Kazan, artist and samurai, in a diary recording a sojourn in Enoshima, an island off Kamakura ...
Japan has found an answer to loneliness, despair, fear, disgust and uncertainty. Hint: It's alive, stands on four legs and barks. Well, so much the better if the gloom weighing us down can be so easily dispelled. Or is it? Japan's pet boom is an ...
PURIFYING ZEN: Watsuji Tetsuro's Shamon Dogen. Translated by Steve Bein. University of Hawai'i Press, 2011, 174 pp., $24 (paper) Zen is baffling: You find yourself wrestling with thoughts such as "It is easy to grasp body-mind. The world is like rice or flax or bamboo ...
Young people the world over are stuck with the world as it is, a world they had no hand in making. From the sidelines they blame their elders for this stupidity and that, and vow to do better when their turn comes, only to ...
What's ailing us? The list is long. In a nutshell: stress. Sixty percent of Japan's work force suffers from it, according to the business magazine Weekly Toyo Keizai. That's astonishing. If 60 percent of people in a given environment are miserable — and stress, beyond ...
What a pity Aristophanes died c. 388 B.C: That classical Athenian comic playwright knew politics and politicians. They kindled his comic wrath. "O, thou that shavest close thy passionate arse!" he wrote of one politician. Of another: "Noisome was the stench that issued ...
Can Japan afford nuclear power? Can Japan afford to dispense with nuclear power? If the answer to both questions is no — as, in the wake of the Fukushima reactor meltdowns, it appears it may be — we are at a fukurokōji (袋小路, impasse). ...
Radiation and rubble — that's Japan's reality now and for the foreseeable future; the only escape is to seize the bull called "relevance" by the horns and fling it to the devil. Gladly I accept the challenge. If I need an excuse, the bimonthly ...
