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What my father, RFK, means today Think of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson or Richard Nixon. Each, in his own way, is firmly set in a certain era of American history. Yet as vibrant as they were at the same peak of their power and influence, none of these men could easily slip into the contemporary political world. Their leadership was unique to their time and place.  That does not ring true for my father, Robert F. Kennedy, who was killed 50 years ago. His appearance is ever modern: the shaggy hair, the skinny ties, the suit jacket off, the shirt sleeves rolled. Beyond appearances, what is striking about RFK are the themes he returned to again and again — themes that still energize the debate and resonate in our own time.  Think of the headlines over the past few years and it is  easy to hear Robert Kennedy's voice and imagine him  speaking out in our country — on the madness of gun  violence, the shame of police brutality, the need for  com...

Why Japan has more old-fashioned music stores than anywhere else in the world 1. For many people, the days of wandering into a store, browsing the shelves, and walking out with music stored on plastic are a distant memory. In Japan, however, the CD is still king. Globally, 39% of all music sales are physical CDs and vinyl, but in Japan, the figure is double that. It helps make Japan the world’s second biggest music market, selling more than ¥254 billion ($2.44 billion) worth of music a year—most of it in the form of CDs. 2. Feeding that demand are 6,000 music stores, according to an estimate from the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ). To put that in context, the US is the world’s largest music market in terms of revenue, but has about 1,900 old-fashioned music stores, according to Almighty Music Marketing. Germany, the third biggest market, has only around 700 stores. 3. Japan’s odd consumer behaviour is a prime example of the Galapagos syndrome, a business ...

Step up war on plastic pollution 1. Plastic pollution in the world’s oceans poses an increasingly grave environmental hazard. Japan, which relies on the ocean for its survival, is urged to take a more proactive role in international efforts to combat the problem through recycling and cutting back on the manufacturing and use of disposable plastic products. 2. Japan, along with the United States, abstained from signing the “Ocean Plastic Charter” that was endorsed by other Group of Seven members and the European Union at the G7 summit held earlier this month in Canada. 3. The charter set a target of ensuring, in cooperation with industrial sectors, 100 percent reuse, recycling and collection of all plastic products by 2030, thus significantly reducing the volume of plastic waste.  4. The government explained that Japan was not ready for tight regulations on plastic products because it has to carefully assess the impact on people’s lives and its industries. True, ...

71-year-old woman arrested for keeping dead mother’s body in apartment for 18 months SAPPORO  - Police in Sapporo on Monday arrested a 71-year-old woman on suspicion of abandoning the body of her mother in their apartment in Kita Ward for the past 18 months. Police said Etsuko Miyoshi continued to collect the pension of her mother, Mitsu Ozawa, who died at the age of 98 in January 2017, Sankei Shimbun reported. Miyoshi was quoted by police as saying that when her mother died, she couldn’t afford to pay for a funeral. The apartment building is scheduled to be demolished later this month. Miyoshi's mother owned the apartment. After the building management company was unable to contact her for some time, a representative of the company and police visited the apartment on June 30 and discovered the remains of Miyoshi’s mother. Police said Miyoshi told them she continued to collect her mother’s pension because she needed the money to live on.

Face the reality of racism in Japan JUN 3, 2018 GIFU –  Recent events continue to suggest that discussions of racism in Japan typically prove problematic. This is largely because those discussions typically present it as a “uniquely” Western phenomenon, a matter of black and white or white and nonwhite, from which a mythic “uniquely monoracial” Japan has been spared. Rather, when the issue is broached, as it was recently following controversies provoked by blackface performances, it is dismissed as arising from Japanese racial naivete. And while a conscious antipathy may not motivate some of these acts, a more insidious implicit bias remains. A recent study of implicit bias by Matsumoto University psychologist Kazuo Mori notes that Japanese have an implicit bias against blacks, concluding that “Japanese participants showed an implicit preference for ‘white people’ over ‘black people.’ ” Mori suggests that this bias may be the product of the “media in which whites ...

Japanese lawmakers' average annual income unchanged in 2017 at ¥24 million TOKYO  - Japanese lawmakers' annual income averaged 24.12 million yen in 2017, unchanged from a year earlier, with the top three earning over 200 million yen each through stock sales, parliamentary data showed Monday. While lower house members did not receive salaries during the dissolution of parliament and general election period last year, their average income remained unchanged due to increased gains from other business activities such as lawyer or writer fees as well as income from managing property. Topping the list was Ichiro Aisawa, a 64-year-old House of Representatives member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, who reported 711.93 million yen after selling shares in a company run by a relative and a property in Tokyo's upscale Minami-Aoyama area. The lawmaker secured about 325.64 million yen from the share sale and 254.73 million yen from the property sale that his office sa...

Japan booed as it advances on yellow cards Nice guys don't necessarily finish last at the World Cup. Fair play, a newly implemented tiebreaker in the group stage of the world's biggest soccer tournament, was put into use for the first time Thursday and Japan came out as the beneficiary. Despite losing 1-0 to Poland, the Japanese were able to advance to the round of 16 because they received fewer yellow cards than Senegal, which lost to Colombia by the same score at the same time. Once Colombia had scored in Samara, Japan knew it had done enough to advance even though it was losing late in its match. The Japanese players slowed play down to almost nothing, softly passing the ball back and forth in little triangles in their own end to waste time. "My decision was to rely on the other match," Japan coach Akira Nishino said. "I'm not too happy about this but ... I forced my players to do what I said. And we went through. "It was an ultimate decision fo...

Why is hi-tech Japan using cassette tapes and faxes? 1. Japan has a reputation for being fascinated by robots and hi-tech gadgets - a nation at the forefront of manufacturing innovation.  But the technological reality in many offices is strikingly different.  This is a country that uses people to do the work of traffic lights and where big-name companies running 10-year-old software is the norm. 2. There are even tape cassettes for sale in the ubiquitous convenience stores for office use, along with fax machines - remember them? Even tech visionaries like Sony still use a fax. 3. "Japanese companies generally lag foreign companies by roughly five-to-10 years in adoption of modern IT practices, particularly those specific to the software industry," says Patrick McKenzie, boss of Starfighter, a software company with operations in Tokyo and Chicago.  "The pace of development is glacial ." 4. It's a curiosity for any observer of a country that ...