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Keywords: Japan

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Different country, different culture (or how different legal systems view deal-making)

    • Frank Brennan
    • 12 October 2017

    In the 16th century it was the Dominican friars like Vitoria, Las Casas and Montesino in Salamanca who confronted the state and challenged public opinion about the rights of the indigenous peoples in Spain's newly colonised lands. Not even the most nostalgic and forgiving Jesuit would opine that the modern practitioners of Morality with a capital M challenging the powers of the market and the state would be found in a modern monastery.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Respect and tranquility in a Japanese tea ceremony

    • Penny Garnsworthy
    • 19 June 2017
    8 Comments

    In 15th Century Japan a young man named Murata Shukou, who was studying for the priesthood, began to practice Zen philosophy. His teacher explained that the spirit of Zen was also present in the practice of tea-making, so Shukou began a journey of discovery into making and serving tea. There are almost 40 steps involved in this ancient ritual; time stops and I am mesmerised by the rhythm and the silence, as if I am separated from the world and nought exists save for the movement.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    East Timorese heroes of Australian wars

    • Susan Connelly
    • 24 April 2017
    20 Comments

    Fearful of the southward thrust of the Japanese, the Australian government entered East Timor against the wishes of its Portuguese colonisers. The move was not to protect the Timorese, but to thwart possible attacks on Australia. A band of intrepid Australian soldiers, never numbering more than 700, successfully held off thousands of Japanese in Timor, but only because they had the support of the local people. Between 40,000 and 60,000 Timorese died as a result of Japanese reprisals.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The wondrous life and death of Japanese cherry blossoms

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 20 April 2017
    4 Comments

    Cherry blossom season in Japan is anticipated all winter long but when it arrives it is nothing more than a tease. It is a kind of new year, a starting over, a washing clean of the slate and beginning afresh. But these blossoms hold in their being the promise of death. 'With cherry blossoms, we start things over,' translates my guide, from a haiku. 'And we find beauty not only in the cherry blossoms but also in how they flutter to the ground.' It's from that fluttering that we derive the most valuable of lessons.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Japan's Olympic dream disrupts disaster recovery

    • Pepi Ronalds
    • 06 March 2017
    3 Comments

    This week marks the anniversary of the triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown) that hit northern Japan on 11 March 2011. The event took over 18,000 lives, and initially displaced 470,000 people. Six years on, 127,000 are still without a permanent home. Delays have been caused by the sheer physical scope, pre-existing regulations and other restrictions. These are all understandable. What is less easy to accept are the disruptions caused by the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Faith is torture in Scorsese's Silence

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 22 February 2017
    6 Comments

    It is the story of two 17th century Portuguese Jesuits who travel to Japan to locate their former mentor, who is said to have renounced his faith, and to spread Catholicism. They find the local Christian populations have been driven underground, under threat of torture and execution. The lesson they come to learn against this fraught backdrop is that the living out of religious faith and the strengths and limitations of ordinary humanity cannot be considered in isolation from each other.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Scorsese misses the depths of the 'Japanese swamp'

    • Jeremy Clarke
    • 22 February 2017
    7 Comments

    We are treated at length to Rodrigues' reflections upon the face of Christ, yet the beautiful inculturated image 'Madonna of the Snows' passes us quickly by. There are haunting local hymns yet the missionaries speak halting Japanese. The local church is served by a respected un-ordained head, who leads his fellow villagers in prayer and good works. The survival of the Japanese Catholic community rested on the feeble, faith-filled shoulders of the local women and men who kept praying even unto death.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Valuing the lives of people with disability

    • Joan Hume
    • 08 September 2016
    15 Comments

    On 26 July this year of 19 severely disabled residents were massacred as they slept in their beds at a residential care facility in Sagamihara, Japan. A further 26 were wounded. The perpetrator, Satoshi Uematsu, a former employee sacked for his disturbing views about the residents, later boasted of his 'achievements': 'It is better that disabled people disappear.' Isn't there an ever present probability that without an inclusive and accepting community, without believing in our possibilities rather than seeing only our limitations, we will spawn the likes of another Satoshi Uematsu here?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Reading in end times

    • Ellena Savage
    • 19 February 2016
    5 Comments

    There's a part in Murakami's Norwegian Wood, I told a friend, where a character loses someone, and walks for weeks around Japan until he reaches the beach, where he just stares out to sea. I feel so desolate, I said, that that's what I want to do. I don't know for sure that that's what really happened in the book, or if I was really that desolate ... Maybe that's what reading is for; to build a repertoire of emotional and social situations in order to connect with feelings that don't have words.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The last year

    • Diane Fahey
    • 19 January 2016
    2 Comments

    They'd stopped by then, your half-filled crosswords with their fey surmises — inspired leaps from the backs of routine clues ... I glimpsed alcoves of dusty treasure: kris — 'Malayan dagger'; obi — 'a Japanese sash'; écus — 'old French coins'. You summoned bird names from the air: rhea, erne; had the secrets of ponds and streams at your fingertips: eft, orfe, elver ... 'open', 'small seeds'; six letters. You would have got that.

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  • ECONOMICS

    New world order of gas and finance

    • David James
    • 15 December 2015
    3 Comments

    In the early 1990s, America, Europe and Japan accounted for about 90 per cent of world GDP. Now, they account for less than half. The BRICs and other developing nations have grown steadily (in China's case spectacularly) while Europe has stagnated and America has sputtered at best. Recent developments in the geopolitics of fossil fuels and in finance confirm the perception that the rise of China and the developing world spells the end of US global hegemony. Against this backdrop, the narrative of the West has grown increasingly incoherent.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Japanese pilgrim enters the void

    • Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
    • 01 August 2014
    3 Comments

    In his native Japan, the name Haruki Murakami has immense currency. In the first week of its release his latest novel Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage sold more than one million copies. Coming from a traditional culture where assimilation and social order has been a historical imperative, perhaps the book's themes go beyond the intimate to acknowledge the soul-eating, conformist nature of society.

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