Mercury Contamination in Japan’s Dolphin and Whale Meat
Police have opened investigations into dolphin and whale meat being sold in Wakayama Prefecture after accepting a criminal complaint regarding illegal levels of dangerous toxins.
Bread & Roses: Tragedy and Prison for a Pregnant Foreign Intern
In August 2018 at the age of 19, Le Thi Thuy Linh arrived in Japan from Vietnam to work as a foreign technical intern. Little did she know that she would become a victim of tragedy, then convicted for it as a criminal.
Homeless in Kannai
The Yokohama Spring Homeless Patrol offers hope to those in the most desperate need for help within their community.
Visible Minorities: Good Riddance to an Evil Man
Former Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, who died February 1, was an evil man. Any honest obituary would admit as such.
Japanese Right Targets Vietnamese Residents
Japanese have long tended to view foreigners as sources of crime within their communities, but in recent years Vietnamese, the nation’s fastest-growing foreign community, have begun to be singled out by rightwing commentators as posing the most serious alleged threat.
Kurt Campbell’s Grand Miscalculations
Kurt Campbell, the Biden administration’s National Security Council Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, is the “brain” behind much of what the Pentagon and US State Department are doing in East Asia today, but his policy approaches do not correspond with the realities of a global US empire now in rapid decline.
Japan Reopening Set to Be Too Little, Too Late
Calls by business groups and the academic world have increased pressure on Japan to reconsider its overly strict border policies and to reopen the country to essential travelers, but for many of the foreign students who have been desperately trying to enter in Japan for the past two years, the damage has already been done.
Bread & Roses: Remote Jobs Upend Work-Life Balance
Remote work is no longer a remote concept. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, we have seen telework, work-from-home, and workations soar in the popular imagination, and indeed become a reality in many lives.
Japan Can’t Say No to US Weapons Systems
Recent revelations regarding the Japanese government’s purchase of US military drones underlines the East Asian nation’s unwillingness to refuse the “requests” of their US allies as they relate to the acquisition of weapons systems.
Brutalizing Japan’s Foreign Worker Underclass
A broken rib, a chipped tooth—a worker kicked and beaten frequently over a period of two years. This is not a horror story of a survivor of a Chinese labor camp in Xinjiang, but rather that of a Vietnamese “technical intern” in Okayama, Japan.