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.
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.
The Covid pandemic has gradually unleashed political and social forces in Japan that have lifted its underlying xenophobia to the surface, and thus transformed its culture from one of attraction into one of repulsion for many of its previous admirers.
In what may prove to be an escalating problem in Japan, young Chinese looking for employment in small startups and technology-related firms appear to be facing a wall of suspicion and sometimes outright racism.
Since 2008, I have always devoted my end-year columns to counting down the Top Ten human rights issues as they pertain to Non-Japanese residents of Japan. This year I’m moving this feature to the Shingetsu News Agency.
Less than two weeks after the Shingetsu News Agency issued its SNA Covid Variant Handbook, the World Health Organization finally stepped up to plate and belatedly offered its own new nomenclature.
Ahead of Donald Trump’s second visit to Japan in 2019, a Japanese hotelier invited the US president’s former chief strategist and senior advisor Steve Bannon to give a “special lecture” in Tokyo. That hotelier’s name is Toshio Motoya.
The appointment of moderate Yoshimasa Hayashi as Japanese foreign minister has elicited a good deal of discussion in the Chinese news media, with voices on both sides of the Taiwan Strait trying to interpret what it means for the region in an era of heightened tensions.
Toyota Motor Corporation, the world’s largest automaker by production volume, is under fire from environmentalists and others who contend that it now possesses the very worst record among its global peers on responding to the climate crisis.
The government announced that it widened the door to foreign nationals’ entry to Japan starting from November 8 for short-term business travelers, foreign students, and technical interns, but byzantine regulations continue to signal that the welcome mat for foreigners is not yet out, and students in particular are feeling the brunt.
