Word: caste
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...first hours as Japan's new ruling party, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and its leader Yukio Hatoyama wasted no time preparing for a transition of government. In the historic Aug. 30 general election, the Japanese people - about 70% of eligible voters cast ballots - ended a half-century of nearly unbroken rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Hatoyama's party took 308 of the 480 seats in the House of Representatives, 12 seats shy of a two-thirds majority that would have allowed the party to single-handedly pass bills rejected by the upper house...
...Empire - and the shadows they have cast over Britain - have been very good to Kureishi, providing him with two rich seams of material for his fiction. "When I was a kid, people were always talking about the death of the novel," he says, sitting in a café near his home in London's Shepherd's Bush. "But ever since [Salman Rushdie's 1981 novel] Midnight's Children, it's been terrifically lively. There's been a revolution in writing in the West. And that's thanks to colonialism." Read "God for the Godless: Salman Rushdie's Secular Sermon...
...Asians - even those, like Kureishi, born in Britain to an Indian father and an English mother - were Pakistanis, and whose friends went out on weekends looking for brown-skinned people to beat up, spun his anger into art. While other children of immigrants tried to create an identity through cast-iron faith, Kureishi forged his through rebellious fiction. His works were a mosh pit of high and low Western culture, with knowing references to Wittgenstein and Genet, ecstasy raves and gay sex. Suddenly, Asian Britain wasn't just about corner shops, victimhood and longing for Bombay, but anarchy...
...Japanese people voted for the DPJ, with its slogans of "Regime Change" and "Livelihood First," amidst the worst economic crisis in Japan's postwar history. An unprecedented 14 million votes were cast in advance of Sunday's election, accounting for about 13% of all eligible voters. And voter turnout is expected to reach 70% - the highest in nearly 20 years. As exit polls came out around the nation, television media tended to focus on which LDP candidates lost - marking LDP incumbents with red batsu or Xs - rather than focus on the DPJ winners, reflecting a widely held belief that Sunday...
...electorate is already showing a level of political interest higher than in previous general elections. More than three million people have cast early ballots, up more than 50% from the 2005 general election. And voter turnout, for 104 million eligible voters, could reach 70% - the highest rate for a general election since 1990. (See pictures of Japan in 1989 and Japan...