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An obscure communist newspaper is shaping Japan’s politicsStories by Shimbun Akahata consistently pack a punch Since Japan’s parliamentary session began three months ago, one issue has dominated the agenda: a financial scandal within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). At the end of last year, prosecutors launched an investigation into factions of the LDP which had failed to report revenue
IZUMI KENTA, the leader of Japan’s main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), is itching for change. In an interview with The Economist, the self-declared progressive laments the country’s slow growth and demographic woes. The culprit, he reckons, is the conservative rule of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has endured for most of the past seven decades. “Old values have kept
Asian geopolitics is often described in terms of two giants: America, the incumbent superpower, and China, a rising one, standing astride the region and competing to pull smaller countries to their sides, including the ten members of ASEAN, the Association of South-East Asian Nations. But this misses a lot. It elides smaller countries’ agency and oversimplifies what is rarely a Manichaean divide.
Global investors are giddy about Japan again. Warren Buffett made his first visit to Tokyo in more than a decade this spring; he has built up big holdings in five trading houses that offer exposure to a cross-section of Japan Inc. Last month Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, joined the pilgrimage to Japan’s capital. “History is repeating itself,” he told Kishida Fumi
FIVE MONTHS into its counter-offensive, Ukraine has managed to advance by just 17 kilometres. Russia fought for ten months around Bakhmut in the east “to take a town six by six kilometres”. Sharing his first comprehensive assessment of the campaign with The Economist in an interview this week, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, says the battlefield reminds him of the great conf
In a classroom in Warabi, north of Tokyo, an 11-year-old boy chatters in Japanese as he practises writing the characters for “river” and “tree”. The scene is unremarkable, save for the fact that the boy, Boran, is not Japanese but Kurdish. Warabi and the surrounding area are home to around 2,000 Turkish Kurds, a number that has quadrupled in a decade. Kebab shops line the streets and instructions
The woefully inauthentic Tuscan joint is an all-American favourite. New research shows that its 1,800 branches also serve a social purpose. Maxim Massenkoff of the Naval Postgraduate School and Nathan Wilmers of MIT Sloan School of Management used mobile data to track where millions of Americans spend their time. By matching people’s movements to socioeconomic data on where they live, they were ab
KURUMIN AROMA, a 33-year-old YouTuber who lives near Tokyo, used to dream of becoming a singer. A decade ago, a man approached her on the street and asked her to be a swimsuit model. He also offered to pay for singing classes and help her succeed in the entertainment business. After some cajoling, she agreed. On the day of the photo shoot, she was coaxed into getting naked. She ended up appearing
Kobe, in western Japan, is best known for its marbled beef. But feasting on the delicacy was not what brought Igor Korkhovyi to town last month. At an auditorium in the city centre, he and a group of other officials from Ukraine tucked into a day of meetings and lectures. “We should learn from your experience,” he told the region’s governor. Japan’s armed forces, which have not fired a shot in com
“Adam is a special child,” says the voice-over, as the camera pans across abandoned classrooms and deserted maternity wards. “He’s the last child born in Italy.” The short film made for Plasmon, an Italian brand of baby food owned by Kraft-Heinz, a giant American firm, is set in 2050. It imagines an Italy where babies are a thing of the past. It is exaggerating for effect, of course, but not by as
Aleksandr otdelnov owns an unusual tourist attraction: a smuggling museum. Contraband has been flowing through his native Odessa since the 18th century. Until it closed because of covid-19, the museum displayed everything from pearls and pistols sneaked into imperial Russia to more contemporary loot. Then came the war in February 2022. “The port stopped working, and everything stopped,” says Mr Ot
A couple of years ago Jake Morgan, a farmer who lives just outside Raleigh, in North Carolina, realised he needed a new vehicle to get around his property. At first he was looking at “side-by-sides”—a sort of off-road utility vehicle. But watching a review on YouTube of one that costs around $30,000 made by John Deere, he saw a comment that said something like “Why don’t you just get a minitruck i
Such mythologising is understandable. For thousands of years the starchy seeds of the grass plant Oryza sativa (often called Asian rice) have been the continent’s main foodstuff. Asia accounts for 90% of the world’s rice production and almost as much of its consumption. Asians get more than a quarter of their daily calories from rice. The UN estimates that the average Asian consumes 77kg of rice a
THE MUGHAL PRINCE Dara Shikoh was beheaded in 1659 after publishing a scandalous book, “The Confluence of the Two Seas”, in which he identified a spiritual affinity between Hinduism and Islam. In 2007 Abe Shinzo, then Japan’s prime minister, borrowed the book’s title for a stirring speech to India’s parliament in which he called for the Indian and Pacific oceans to be seen as one strategic space,
Mr Tokugawa, who took over from his father last month in the dynasty’s first succession for over half a century, cuts an incongruous figure at the head of a family perhaps best known for barring its subjects from travelling abroad. He is a consummate internationalist, who grew up partly in New York and completed master’s degrees at the University of Michigan and Columbia University. He is a prolif
ASHIHARA MARINA, a 25-year-old from Kanagawa, near Tokyo, wanted to see the world. Last April she seized the opportunity to migrate to Australia through its government’s “working holiday” programme, which affords one-year visas to under-31-year-olds. She spent four months working on a farm in eastern Australia and now works as a barista in Sydney. What started as an adventure has found an economic
Outside China, covid weighs less heavily on people’s minds these days. Yet health-care systems in much of the rich world are closer to collapse than at any point since the disease started to spread. Unlike for unemployment or gdp, there are few comparable, up-to-date figures on health-care performance across countries. So The Economist has trawled statistics produced by countries, regions and even
“Revolution+1”, a new Japanese film, opens with actual footage of the killing of Abe Shinzo, Japan’s former prime minister, last July. The grainy frames show Abe giving a stump speech in Nara while his assassin, Yamagami Tetsuya, approaches from behind wielding a homemade gun. The feature film proceeds to portray a sympathetic protagonist named Kawakami, whose biography bears a striking resemblanc
What to read (and watch) to understand women in JapanSix books (and one film) on life in one of the rich world’s most sexist countries IN THE ECONOMIST’s 2022 glass-ceiling index, an annual measure of the role and influence of women in the workforce in 29 countries, only South Korea scored lower than Japan. The World Economic Forum’s 2022 Global Gender Gap Report, which also factors in political r
Japanese Manga are being eclipsed by Korean webtoonsThe industry’s business model has hardly changed since the 1960s Lee hyun-seok grew up in South Korea addicted to Japanese manga series such as “Dragon Ball” and “Slam Dunk”. As soon as he could, he emigrated to Tokyo to build a successful career as a manga artist and editor. Then in the early 2000s came “webtoons”, a South Korean cartoon innovat
Many Japanese are still reluctant to go unmaskedWhy get a face lift when you can get a face covering? ZAWACHIN, a Japanese celebrity, has long been known for her stylish face masks. When she started her career a decade ago, wearing masks helped draw attention to her lavishly made-up eyes. With time, masks became part of her brand, and she carved out a niche as a “mask influencer”. The pandemic bro
Could the war in Ukraine go nuclear?Sixty years after the Cuban missile crisis, the world again worries about nuclear war Sixty years ago the world was staring at a nuclear cataclysm. The Cuban missile crisis began in October 1962 when America detected Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. It blockaded the island, and debated invading it. The Soviets yielded, removing their nukes; America secretly remo
A study of lights at night suggests dictators lie about economic growthSatellite data hints at the scale of their deception Benito Mussolini was a tyrant, but at least he made the trains run on time. Or so the story goes. Dictators are often seen as ruthless but effective. Official GDP figures support this view. Since 2002 average reported economic growth in autocracies has been twice as fast as i
Covid-19 vaccines saved an estimated 20m lives during their first yearTheir impact in poor countries depends on how effectively governments prioritised recipients The development of covid-19 vaccines was a scientific triumph. Converting it into medical benefits has required getting shots into the arms of as many people as possible, a process fraught with political and logistical hurdles. Nonethele
The killing shocked Japan. Gun violence is exceedingly rare: the country saw just one gun death in all of 2021. Political violence, too, has been virtually unheard of in recent years. Mr Abe had already earned the historic distinction of being Japan’s longest-serving premier, over two stints in office from 2006 to 2007 and from 2012 to 2020. The assassination made him the only Japanese head of gov
Those trips helped transform Japan’s foreign-policy focus and standing in Asia—and confirmed Mr Abe as the most consequential Japanese statesman since the second world war. Mr Abe once explained to Banyan that China’s ascendance posed an existential challenge to Japan similar to that of Western imperial powers when they turned up in gunboats in Tokyo Bay in the mid-19th century. At home, his respo
Mr Abe had an ideological core. It was Abe the conservative nationalist who repelled his neighbours and polarised his country. Yet he also developed a studied pragmatism. This Abe was a realist who strengthened Japan’s defences and rallied allies. Despite Mr Abe’s death Japan is likely to stick to the course he set. It will remain committed to boosting its own armed forces, reinforcing its allianc
Abe Shinzo, the champion of JapanMr Abe was killed on July 8th. He was the country’s most consequential prime minister in decades ABE SHINZO had already guaranteed his place in Japan’s history books. As prime minister from 2012 to 2020, he served longer than any other post-war leader. When an assassin shot him at an election-campaign event on July 8th, Mr Abe, 67, also became the first Japanese he
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