SINCE the days of Park Chung-hee’s often brutal dictatorship (he seized power in 1961 and was assassinated in 1979), South Korea has transformed itself as a democratic nation. Its politics, enlivened by occasional fisticuffs in the National Assembly, are among the most vibrant in Asia. The bid by the late strongman’s daughter, Park Geun-hye, to […]
In 1889, two years after an eccentric American millionaire established the European edition of The New York Herald, the precursor of the International Herald Tribune, Rudyard Kipling dined with some British businessmen in Hong Kong. The imperial rulers of China, most recently humiliated by France, had reluctantly started to modernize their vast domain; and British […]
ONCE again, the Japanese public must be wondering whether politics only serves to inflict cruel jokes upon them. On September 26th the opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) chose Shinzo Abe, a nationalist former prime minister, to lead it into the next general election, even though he quit as leader after just a year in 2007 […]
NEW YORK — Eleven years ago today, some two dozen Japanese citizens were among the nearly 3,000 people killed in the terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center. The date is now immortalized as “9/11,” and its aftermath has changed the world in countless ways. With the benefit of hindsight, the world may well […]
looking beyond borders 