On March 27, 2023, the Tokyo District Court handed down a mixed ruling in the latest case of what is called academic harassment, or akahara. Courts increasingly handle such cases, and this one caused quite a stir in the public mind since the defendant was none other than celebrated art critic Michio Hayashi.
SEALDs, short for Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy, was a student activist organization in Japan that provided an important spark to the large-scale protests against then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s 2015 “Legislation for Peace and Security” (i.e. the Abe War Law), deemed by the vast majority of Japan’s legal scholars in the field to be unconstitutional.
Dateline Tokyo, our series of short reports on major news developments in Japan, for August 2020
A roundup of the most significant news stories from Japan reported in the first half of December 2019.
On November 20, 2019, Tokyo police arrested a drug suspect. This time it was a 32-year-old Norwegian university student named Ingrid Martinussen, who is autistic. This case is a crystal clear example of Japan’s irrational approach to its war on drugs and of a legal system which has spun out of control.
Host Michael Penn interviews scholar Nancy Snow about the persuasive techniques of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
The Sankei Shinbun has never been a newspaper that shies away from controversy. In a country that still struggles with its recent history and that is in the midst of allegedly far-reaching reforms, several of the conservative newspaper’s strongly opinionated pieces have given rise to controversy, raising questions about whether or not some of the newspaper’s activities could be called journalism at all–or whether “rightwing activism” would be a better label.
For seventeen years a private aid group has been feeding the homeless of Shibuya Ward during the winter holiday period when city services are otherwise unavailable. In the early years, about one hundred homeless would show up and participate, but in recent years that number has swelled to about two hundred, according to the organizers.
