Sanae Takaichi has done something few Japanese leaders manage. She’s reached her first anniversary in office more popular than her predecessors, and she looks well placed to keep the job. In a country that has burned through five prime ministers in a decade, this counts for a lot. Popularity, though, is only one of two […]

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Recent media reports projecting South Korea’s per capita GDP to surpass Japan’s have generated considerable excitement across the regional countries that see Korea as a role model. According to the IMF’s October 2026 projections, South Korea’s nominal GDP per capita could reach approximately $49,000 in 2027, compared with Japan’s $37,000-38,000. Its achievements in semiconductors, advanced […]

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Jeffrey Miller’s newest novel, The Tree at Panmunjom, begins in the summer of 1976, as a soldier fresh out of basic training named Bill Davis arrives in South Korea and finds himself assigned to Camp Kitty Hawk just before serving a tense 24-hour shift at the nearby Demilitarized Zone’s Joint Security Area.  On arrival at […]

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The Earth got its Moon when a small planet collided with our planet more than four billion years ago. This impact hurled molten rock into space, which eventually coalesced to form the satellite we can see every night from across our planet. But what of our neighbor, Mars? The Red Planet has two small, irregularly […]

The post Japan’s MMX space mission probes how Mars got its moons appeared first on Asia Times.

Beyond all the pageantry, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping had a strategic goal for his Washington visit – to undermine the American relationship with Japan. Xi succeeded, perhaps beyond his expectations. Japanese policy makers saw this coming. They arranged a brief meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly between Prime Minister Takaichi […]

The post How China deploys wartime history against Japan appeared first on Asia Times.

The 2026 Asian Games in Japan drew to a close on October 4 following two weeks of competition between 45 countries and territories across 43 sports. Despite the official slogan “Imagine One Asia,” fragmented regional politics came to the fore as the event unfolded. Just days before the games officially began, tensions between Japan and […]

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Hydrogen-powered passenger cars have been left far behind by electric vehicles and hybrids, but the hydrogen truck market is growing and new technology developed for auto racing is keeping hopes for hydrogen cars alive. Toyota and its European partners are in the vanguard of these developments. On September 26 and 27, at the FIA World […]

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When a South Korean soldier stepped on a land mine in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on September 21, it might have been taken as a grim reminder of a war that never formally ended. Instead, the explosion has revealed something more unsettling: the Korean Peninsula’s old security order is shifting, even as Seoul tries to […]

The post To keep the peace, South Korea’s Lee must prepare for war appeared first on Asia Times.

Two races were held at Fuji Speedway last weekend: the six-hour FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) and the Race Against Dementia led by champion driver Sir Jackie Stewart OBE, who returned to Japan 60 years after winning the Fuji 200 race to campaign for his charitable foundation and wave the green flag at the start […]

The post Sir Jackie Stewart brings his race against dementia to Japan appeared first on Asia Times.

If the wars of 2026 have demonstrated anything, it is that drones have become a key element of modern warfare. In Eastern Europe, both Moscow and Kyiv deploy drones at an unprecedented scale across the theater’s so-called “kill zone.” For Ukraine, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have shown incredible tactical value, allowing its forces to strike […]

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