Word: tokyo
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...Stanford University, followed his granddaddy into the Prime Minister's post and immediately set about changing Japan's economy, government - and relationship with the U.S. "It was always in response to what the U.S. had to say that Japan followed," Hatoyama told TIME in an exclusive interview in his Tokyo office. "I believe we should say to each other what we need to say. The time has come for us to seek a more equal relationship." (See pictures of how Japan has changed in 20 years...
...from clear what, precisely, Hatoyama means by "more equal," but there's little doubt that his government policy has completely altered the tenor of relations between the U.S. and its closest ally in Asia. Twenty years ago, Tokyo and Washington routinely sparred, most often over trade, but in the past decade the two nations seemed to become closer than ever. Japan backed America's antiterror campaign, for example, by marshaling refueling missions in the Indian Ocean to support U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Japan was looking more American at home as well. Under Junichiro Koizumi, Prime Minister from...
...state with a wider government-funded social safety net. Though Hatoyama has continued to stress the crucial nature of the U.S.-Japan alliance and his friendly relationship with President Barack Obama - "We have come to call each other Barack and Yukio," he said during Obama's November visit to Tokyo - he has also backed away from policies that Washington views as vitally important to its global security priorities. In January, Hatoyama ended the refueling missions in the Indian Ocean, just as Obama was ramping up operations in Afghanistan. Most irritating to Washington has been Hatoyama's effort to renegotiate...
...good thing. Several hundred years ago, the Japanese witnessed death regularly, with bodies buried by family members and samurai displaying severed heads in public. These days, such moments are rare. Such ceremonies would give "an opportunity to think about the dead person," says Masaki Ichinose, a University of Tokyo philosopher and head of the university's Institute of Death and Life Studies, founded in 2002 to encourage more national conversation on death...
...Several years ago, Tokyo's bustling Shinjuku ward began a lonely-death awareness campaign. It hosts social events to draw people from their apartments, distributes a newsletter to the elderly and monitors their well-being by, for example, checking to make sure they're taking out their trash. Other wards have followed suit, but as accurate lonely-death statistics are often unavailable, success is difficult to measure. "If you live alone, it's inevitable that you may die alone," says Yoko Yokota, assistant supervisor of the ward's division for senior-citizen services. "What Shinjuku ward wants...