The Japan Times

OSAKA -- Despite Tokyo's pledge to remain nonnuclear and assurances from top U.S. officials that their most important Pacific ally will do just that, North Korea's apparent atomic test is expected to further weaken taboos about talk of a nuclear-armed Japan in both Washington and Tokyo.

Influential academics and researchers, as well as politicians on both sides of the Pacific, have long called for Japan to seriously consider developing a nuclear deterrent...

"Key American Japan-handlers are helping to coax politicians like (former… more

A Latin proverb says, "fortune favors the bold but abandons the timid." That, more than any other explanation captures the drama of Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's gravity-defying success in catapulting his Liberal Democratic Party to its biggest electoral success ever--in contrast to the rival Democratic Party of Japan imploding from its internal contradictions and political inarticulateness.

Many political observers are casting Koizumi's extraordinary election wizardry in terms of a referendum on postal reform--and reform in general. This is an… more

President George W. Bush has become the new Kenneth Lay. As chief executive officer of the former juggernaut Enron Corp., Lay presided over a network of deception and malfeasance that led to one of the greatest investor ripoffs in U.S. corporate history. Enron inflated reported income and conducted much of its business through off-balance-sheet transactions hidden from analysts, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the general public.

In public, Bush repeatedly denounces these "serious abuses of trust by some corporate leaders."… more

U.S. President George W. Bush has injected potentially destabilizing dynamics into the domestic political arenas of many nations by pressuring all countries essentially to swear loyalty oaths to the United States and to work with him in going "after terrorism wherever we find it in the world . . . getting it by its branch and root."

Russia, China, Tunisia and even North Korea, in addition to nearly every other nation in the world, have signed on to the president's… more