Word: japanism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Tokyo A New Face for Japan On his fourth try for the Prime Minister's post, former Foreign Minister Taro Aso ascended to the top job on Sept. 24. A brash, freewheeling nationalist given to political gaffes (he has joked about Alzheimer's disease and said he wanted Japan to be an attractive destination for "rich Jews"), Aso, 68, cuts a sharply different figure from his dour predecessors, Shinzo Abe and Yasuo Fukuda--whose tenures were dogged, respectively, by scandal and partisan gridlock. A former Olympic sharpshooter and an avid fan of manga comics, he has stressed energizing Japan...
...Japan and Germany make cars. Saudi Arabia pumps oil. China supplies the world with socks and toys and flat-screen TVs. What does the United States produce? Lots of stuff, but in recent years this country's No. 1 export--by far--has been debt...
...early 1980s--which had to be financed by somebody. "The Reagan Revolution was essentially an experiment in seeing how much money America could borrow from overseas," says Murphy, who at the time was an investment banker in Tokyo. The answer was lots. Guided by Murphy and his ilk, Japan snapped up U.S. treasuries and other debt, keeping interest rates here from exploding as many had feared...
...right now are probably [Ferran] Adrià, [Thomas] Keller, Pierre Gagnaire; but there's a whole world of Japanese cooking out there that I don't even understand. The most exciting thing for me would be to take a couple of us from Iron Chef America and drop us in Japan. That's where the real battle, I think, would ensue...
...award for non-Japanese cartoonists, the ex-foreign minister has gained the support of young voters. His characteristic off-the-cuff remarks win him the image of a gruff political straight shooter - he admits, for instance, that he is "prone to pork-barrel spending," but says that to reinvigorate Japan's economy he plans to spend more to stimulate domestic demand. "The economic situation is getting tough," said Aso on Sept. 22, the day he was elected to lead his party. "The biggest mission given to me is to resolve this, and I plan to do my utmost...