A recent BBC investigation of sexual harassment in Japan sparked a major debate on social media within mainland China. In particular, the discussion developed into a verbal battle between men and women, many of whom expressed divergent viewpoints on what issue was most significant about the story.
Scotland First Minister Nicola Sturgeon declared that her government will challenge the United Kingdom in court after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government acted to veto a recently-passed LGBT rights bill—a move that critics say will harm sexual minorities, imperil national unity, and represents fuel on the fire for a culture war.
Saddled with student debt and, in many cases, spending the early years of their professional lives working during the Covid pandemic, members of Generation Z–often defined as those born between 1997 and 2012–are proving to be the most pro-worker generation in the contemporary United States.
The United Kingdom’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has assured the public that its temporary authorization of a controversial pesticide called thiamethoxam will follow strict guidelines to protect the environment from harm, but evidence is mounting that serious damage is being done.
Nike’s television advertisement depicting a multiethnic Japan stands out as a bright spot to close out the dreadful year of 2020.
Defense Minister Taro Kono’s denunciation of NHK and the mainstream news media as “fake news” for reporting that his ministry had decided to give up the Araya Training Area in Akita city as host for an Aegis Ashore facility was a cynical ploy on his part, but it did highlight once again that many people misunderstand the news media in rather fundamental ways.
In 1993, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono made the most full-throated admission and apology acknowledging that Japan had coerced women across Asia into being sex slaves—euphemistically referred to as “Comfort Women”—for the Japanese military during the Pacific War. More recently, however, conservative politicians such as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Osaka Mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura have engaged in a campaign that is less about carving out a path toward reconciliation than to overwrite memories of an unsavory past.
The Yomiuri Shinbun stunned the world in late November with a highly unusual apology. The paper announced that it had found dozens of articles in past issues of the English-language Daily Yomiuri (now called The Japan News) between February 1992 and January 2013 that used the expression “sex slave” to refer to wartime comfort women.
When NHK was founded in 1926, it was quite consciously modelled on the BBC of the United Kingdom. In that spirit, visitors to the English-language section of the NHK webpage will find its self-description as follows: “NHK delivers a wide range of impartial, high-quality programs, both at home and abroad.”
