“Good-bye Pyongyang,” an 82-minute documentary now showing in cinemas across the country, filmed by a Korean resident in Japan, offers a glimpse of life in the North Korean capital through the eyes of a separated family living in the two countries. Director-producer Yang Yong-hi’s three brothers enjoy relative luxury, with consumer items sent by their parents in Japan over the past 30 years, but w

Controversy over illegal political donations of 200,000 yen (2.7 million won) over four years has further shaken the fragile Naoto Kan administration of the Democratic Party of Japan with the resignation of Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara. As the donor happens to be a Korean restaurant owner in Kyoto named Jang, who says she did not know foreigners were banned from political donations, some may be

Preliminary findings in the 2010 census released Feb. 25 by the internal affairs ministry underline the overall trend of a shrinking and graying population as well as a demographic imbalance characterized by a population rise in a few prefectures and a population drop in most prefectures. Japan cannot lose any time in working out policies that will effectively cope with undesirable effects from th

It didn’t take long for well-meaning members of Congress last week to come up with an easy sounding proposal to help the Libyan opposition topple Moammar Gadhafi: Just impose a no-fly zone.“We spend $500 billion on defense and we can’t take down Libyan air defenses?” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told the Washington Post. “You tell those Libyan pilots that there is a no-fly zone, and they are not goi

WASHINGTON ― President Obama has been so low-key in his pronouncements about events in Egypt and Libya that it’s easy to miss the extent of the shift in U.S. strategy. In supporting the wave of change sweeping the Arab world, despite the wariness of traditional allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, Obama is placing a big bet that democratic governments will be more stable and secure, and thereby

A few weeks ago I was at the Denver airport when I overheard a conversation between two men sitting near me. They were eating some form of grab-and-go airport lunch when one man, between bites, suddenly raised his voice and called Michelle Obama something that can’t be printed in a family newspaper.“She wants to control what we eat!” he continued. “She wants the government to be in charge of what’

OXFORD ― Among the most prevalent Western stereotypes about Muslim countries are those concerning Muslim women: doe-eyed, veiled, and submissive, exotically silent, gauzy inhabitants of imagined harems, closeted behind rigid gender roles. So where were these women in Tunisia and Egypt?In both countries, women protesters were nothing like the Western stereotype: they were front and center, in news

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page told a riveting story Wednesday about parents in Compton, California, who are trying to stage a revolution in their local school, one of the worst in the city. They’re wielding a new “parent trigger” law in the state to force out the administrators and bring in a charter school operator. They’re learning that parents who put their children first are seen as

President Obama has thrown his support behind a bill to let states opt out of key features of the healthcare reform law before they take effect, including the controversial requirement that virtually all adult Americans buy insurance. The caveat, though, is that states must offer alternatives that provide comparable coverage to at least as many of the uninsured as the new law would, at no greater

The intellectual roots of the current democracy movement in the Middle East lie with those Muslim thinkers who hold that there is conceptual compatibility between Islam, modernity and democracy. They put stress on concepts such as liberty, human rights and human dignity, freedom of thought, scientific inquiry, contextual interpretation of sharia, the legal principles of the Koran, support for demo

WASHINGTON ― One way out of the mess surrounding the Jan. 27 arrest in Lahore of CIA contractor Raymond Davis, say senior U.S. and Pakistani officials, is a Muslim ritual for resolving disputes known as “blood money.” This approach would require a prominent Islamic intermediary ― perhaps from Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates ― who would invite relatives of the two men Davis killed to the G

Until recently, the nation had 19 airports in operation. But the government had to close four of them during the 2002-07 period because they did not handle enough flights. Only a few others are faring any better than those four. But they are somehow in operation, wasting tens of billions of won in taxpayers’ money each year.A case in point is Muan international airport that opened in South Jeolla

Water resources management, highlighted in the No 1 central document issued in January, will in all probability be discussed at the annual sessions of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Water resources management is very important for China because the per capita availability of water in the country is about one-third of the world average. Pe

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what your country has done for you lately.With apologies to John F. Kennedy, that’s what concerned citizens should be doing to get their heads around the debate in Washington about the appropriate size and role of government.Despite how riveted we are by Washington blood sports, average citizens don’t always understand what “government” means. That’s n

TOKYO ― Asian manufacturers have always migrated in search of cheaper labor. Until recently, China seemed their ultimate destination, claiming an ever larger share of investment by Asia’s huge production networks. But three developments in China ― rising wage inflation, the coming of a new five-year plan that will seek to shift dramatically the Chinese economy’s focus from exports to domestic cons

As the world’s second largest economy, China’s continuous and concrete efforts to raise its energy efficiency are important not only for itself, but for the world. That China has managed to cut energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product by 19.06 percent between 2006 and 2010 on the 2005 levels is a cause for both optimism and caution. It is encouraging to see that the Chinese economy ha

No one doubts the importance of U.S. action to end the regime of Moammar Gadhafi. Unlike Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, whose overthrow inspired a resistance movement in Libya, Gadhafi has made war on his own people. The United States’ response has been muscular, if delayed. President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton explicitly have called for Gadhafi’s removal, a dramatic de

On April 7, 1977, members of the revolutionary committees had plastered a poster of Moammar Gadhafi’s image on my father’s car. On that same day they had, under the dictator’s direct supervision, publicly hanged several dissidents in Benghazi.On the day of the execution, the Ghibli winds blowing from the desert filled the air with dust and turned the sky into a reddish-gray canopy. I’d taken a bus

BERKELEY ― Three times in my life (so far), I have concluded that my understanding of the world was substantially wrong. The first time was after the passage in 1994 of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), when the flow of finance to Mexico to build factories to export to the largest consumer market in the world was overwhelmed by the flow of capital headed to the United States in searc

The Democratic Party of Japan and its junior coalition partner People’s New Party managed to pass the fiscal 2011 92.411 trillion yen budget through the Lower House early Tuesday morning. The opposition-controlled Upper House is certain to vote down the budget. But the budget will be enacted anyhow. Article 60 of the Constitution says that the budget will be enacted within 30 days of being sent to