Sentaku Magazine
Hiroshi Mikitani, PS
Kevin Lees, Suffragio
D. Harsanyi, Federalist
Michael Auslin, Politico

Senile dementia is causing serious social problems in Japan and much of the blame lies with the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry as it attaches importance to aiding those who hav...(full article)

Japan’s population is aging. Our economy is slowing. We are not producing enough coders and digital gurus. The only way we can catch up and restore growth and dynamism is by ...(full article)

It’s still important to recognize that there’s only one country in the world that’s ever used nuclear weapons in war, and that’s the United States of America. That fact is ...(full article)

Yesterday, The Washington Post dutifully reported that, “In Hiroshima, Kerry won’t apologize for atomic bombs dropped on Japan.” Technically, he didn’t. Wha...(full article)

With economic instability and terror plaguing the open West, a case emerges for the insular approach....(full article)
The Japanese countryside is beautiful in winter, spring, summer, and fall, and one of the best ways to appreciate the changing scenery is by riding the rails. Now, a Japanese rail ...
Like other mafia clans across the country, the Inagawa-kai are distant successors of 17th century professional gamblers and merchants. They prospered in broad daylight for decades ...
This is a “Sopranos” approach to national security. Trump does not view the United States’ overseas presence and alliance network as public goods that enable US global leader...
Suggestions such as Trump’s, that we might leave the fight against ISIS to others unless we are paid, proceed from failure properly to identify for what we rightly hazard our...
What’s at stake is nothing less than a race to stockpile plutonium in East Asia that could end very, very badly....
Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, arriving in Washington this week for President Obama’s nuclear-security summit, is America’s strongest ally in Asia — a region...
In Mr. Trump’s worldview, the United States has become a diluted power, and the main mechanism by which he would re-establish its central role in the world is economic bargaining...
Five years after the great East Japan earthquake and tsunami, the port of Onagawa has a craft-beer bar, an artisanal coffeehouse, a Spanish-tile factory, and a workshop where elect...
As we nibble at pork with ginger, Yumi cheerfully tells me about the gigs she has had since joining Client Partners. (The six-year-old agency is the largest in Japan, with eight br...
Faced with its own long-standing territorial issues with Russia, Japan under Shinzo Abe is holding a strong line against the illegal annexation of Crimea....
Five years after an earthquake and tsunami caused a series of meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in Japan, there are signs of progress. Many workers cleaning up the ...
It is no exaggeration to say that household consumer spending has not grown at all even though three years have passed since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced his Abenomics econo...
Five years after the nuclear plant meltdown at Fukushima, Japan has begun the controversial process of restarting its other reactors. The challenge for government and industry rema...
Only a handful of women are in leadership positions. Just 9 percent of Japanese managers are female, compared with 43 percent in the U.S. In 2003, Abe set a goal of increasing that...
Taking Harris’ recent comments on the possibility of U.S.-India-Japan trilateral exercises in the South China Sea and a possible resumption of the QSD nearly a decade later toget...
Many of the owners of Japan’s 11,000 pachinko halls are from the Korean Peninsula, and some with relations to North Korea have sent substantial sums of money back home for ma...
Japan’s population decreased by nearly 1 million people over the past five years according to the country’s latest census, the first recorded population decline for the country...
Since the Obama administration announced its “pivot”—later termed the “rebalance”—to the Asia-Pacific region in 2009, the United States has focu...
It’s not clear whether political priority is being given to correcting the sharp disparity in the value of votes between populous and less populous constituencies....
The DPJ’s turnaround can only be achieved by inviting broad participation of citizens in the selection of its candidates and the establishment of a policy platform, thereby c...
If Trump were to win office, some wise-heads would surely tell him that there is no alternative to U.S. power. With China's growing strength, there is no effective regional balance...
The annualized 1.4 percent decline of Japan’s gross domestic product in the October-December period is yet another indicator of the fragility of the economy. The government s...
Japan, having fought deflation for more than two decades, remains mired in weak growth despite repeated attempts to revitalize its economy. Just weeks after taking office in Decemb...
It is therefore timely to bring together the three leading democracies of Asia, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere, and explore how more explicitly to articulate their joint intere...
Northeast Asia is already fraught with security tensions and rivalries. Imagine the regional response should South Korea ever decide to pursue a nuclear weapons program. China and ...
Like its peers in Denmark, the euro area, Sweden and Switzerland, the Bank of Japan will charge commercial banks for holding deposits with it. Almost a quarter of the world’s...
There are no credible scenarios in which Japanese government debt can ever be repaid in the normal sense of the word “repay”: and none in which the bulk of the BOJ&rsqu...
The Bank of Japan gingerly joins the ranks of central banks penalising deposits...
The most dramatic development in 2015 was that Iran catapulted into the ranks of the great powers, expanding their number to eight. Iran and Saudi Arabia are now engaged in a zero ...
Japan’s innovations seem a wise response to the quirks of the country’s geography. In an introduction to the English translation of the novel Snow Country, by the Nobel...
Faced with this kind of firepower, there is no way you can stay in the market. Nor can you expect a similar bailout -- you employ only 100 people, while Sharp employs 50,000. You f...
To sell the image of a non-threatening Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) at home and abroad, important both in terms of domestic politics and international diplomacy, Tokyo has and will c...
To rectify the problem of vote-value disparity, the council recommended a seat-distribution system that was proposed by John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States....
Japan should urgently examine its culture and traditions and its place in the world, in history, today and tomorrow. It has an immensely rich culture that is the envy of the rest o...
"Having been ushered by the Japanese into the world's purest race, the Koreans in 1945 simply kicked the Japanese out of it," Myers writes. "Much of the Japanese [fascist-era] vers...
The international spotlight on Japan’s prolonged economic woes has helped obscure one of Asia’s farthest-reaching but least-noticed developments — the political r...
Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) was the first film I saw after I moved to Japan in 1987. A Zen-trained painter from San Francisco, who’d spent fifteen years around Kyoto masterin...
National statistics show that Japanese women are increasingly a presence in the workforce: 63.6 percent of women between 15 and 64 are currently in paid work. International figures...
The United States will welcome the breakthrough since it could allow its key Asian allies to refocus attention from past differences to jointly focus on current security threats fr...
Malaysia and Thailand are just two reasons to doubt Asia’s commitment to openness and accountability....
Though the sex slave issue has been a stumbling block in Seoul-Tokyo relations, we cannot live without Japan. It is pivotal to the Korea-U.S.-Japan alliance. You can choose your fr...
Since taking office, Abe has slowly re-militarized Japan, which he seems to earnestly consider both necessary and part of his legacy. But those policies have been unpopular among J...
South Korea and Japan reached a landmark agreement on Monday to resolve the issue of "comfort women", as those who were forced to work in Japan's wartime brothels were euphemistica...
China’s artificial islands are fuelling a new struggle for control of Asia’s oceans, but while the regional superpower dredges military bases out of the ocean, Japan is...
By the end of the Second World War, four million Koreans were living outside Korea, and more than seven hundred thousand Japanese civilians and troops were living inside Korea. But...
Asian shares tumbled Tuesday as Tokyo's stock benchmark plunged 11% on panic selling amid worries that a possible nuclear catastrophe in Japan would further complicate and endang...