Society
Hope for the East Asian Peace Process
With the human race as a whole increasingly threatened by global climate change, overpopulation and food scarcity, our very survival depends on our ability to overcome history-based animosities…
Read MoreArticle 9 and Japan’s Future
Article 9 can also be seen as a gift to humanity, simply denouncing war. Simply doing that.
Read MoreFumio’s World
Japanese animator and illustrator Fumio Obata’s take on life abroad
Read MoreKi: The Vital Force
While ki is regularly invoked as an explanatory principle in oriental medicine and martial arts, few practitioners or writers, either Eastern or Western, spend much time intelligibly explaining ki itself…
Read MoreWhat Global Village?
BY PICO IYER
…the world could be said to be growing less and less connected, if only because the gap between the few of us who babble about the wiring of the planet and the billions who do not grows ever more alarming.
Read MoreJapanese Constitution Cinema
Reading such a dry and formal document can be a real drag to people like me. But there are movies to boost our understanding of Japan’s Peace Constitution.
Read MoreThe Inner Teacher
It has been calculated that it would cost US $4 billion to educate 500 million Indian children conventionally to basic level — but only half that via the Net…
Read MorePerspective Omitted, Questions Unasked
Japan’s mass-circulation newspapers routinely treat events as startling, wholly unexpected, random, and seemingly unrelated to anything that has happened before.
Read MoreThe Pull of the Immediate
MEDIA
BY PICO IYER
New media, old media, it’s all the same: a screening of the world, in every sense, which allows us to throw up new images on the walls of our cave, as we keep our backs ever more rigidly turned to the world outside.
Read MoreJapan’s Nuclear Nightmare
The Monju fast-breeder reactor plant, designed to burn the world’s deadliest substance, plutonium, had been shut down since a December 1995 accident in which a secondary cooling pipe burst…
Read MoreAll the Times in the World
Time…is one of those currencies we exchange every time we cross a border. An hour in Japan (where everything is clockbound, and even televisions show the hour) is equivalent to a day in laid-back India…
Read MoreRe-de-signing people
”People signs,“ seemingly inoffensive, utilitarian directives, guide us along daily routes and routines in Asia and everywhere else. And like most codes inundating the cultural environment “signs“ can also misinform…
Read MoreHost Clubs: Lessons in Language, Culture, and Power
Hosts are sort of heterosexual male sex workers, but they do not sell ‘sex,’ though it can happen outside of the club. It is more of a companionship…
Read MoreLearning from Pyongyang TV
“The thing I like best about Pyongyang TV is no commercials…unless, of course, you understand the programming for what it really is —one long political commercial!”
Read MoreA Princess Ever, an Empress Never?
These days, a woman probably has more prospects of flying to the moon than becoming a titled member of one of the few remaining royal families, whose duties are much less glamorous…
Read MoreInsider Outsider: The Way of the Yakuza
During my first interviews, O-oyabun was particularly eager to talk about ideology: The ‘Way of the Yakuza,’ ‘violating the law’ or ‘doing wrong things.’
Read MoreKorean Protest Culture
In Korea, the traditional protest repertoire of marches, sit-ins, stones and Molotov cocktails is evolving; some of the new techniques remain confrontational, even violent. Others rely on technology, subtlety, inner strength and community…
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