History, Society & Culture
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The Unequal Freedom to Leave
The Inequality That Did Not Produce a Revolution An economy can become more unequal without becoming proportionately more intolerable. That appears to be one…
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The Faith We Sang Together
The Hymns That Remember Us Only after many decades do we begin to understand what certain songs have carried for us. A traditional hymn…
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When Signs Stop Speaking
When Sophistication Begins to Feel Empty There was a time when a minimalist corporate logo seemed to communicate confidence. The clean typeface, restrained colors,…
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The Line That Holds the Throne
A Debate Hidden Inside Another Debate Japan’s current discussion about the Imperial Family appears, at first, to concern a limited institutional problem. The number…
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The Corruption of Good Intentions
The Dream That Inspired the World Many years ago, I encountered the Millennium Development Goals through Jeffrey Sachs’s book The End of Poverty. The…
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A Day’s Work and a Lifetime of Labor
Before Dawn in Kamagasaki When I was a university student in Japan, I once worked as a construction laborer for a day. I did…
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The Language We Might Have Shared
A Textbook and the Promise of Order I no longer remember exactly where I first encountered an Esperanto textbook. I was still a student,…
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The Body Before the Chair
Rediscovering an Ordinary Position Not long ago, I encountered an article about the deep squat as a resting position. It was presented as a…
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Liberalism and Its Illiberal Shadow
When a Sound Idea Acquires a Bad Reputation Liberalism should not be difficult to defend. Its basic commitments are now woven into the moral…
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The Languages That Carry Civilization
A Wall of Books and a Memory of Youth A recent article about a Tokyo bookstore displaying nearly the entire lineup of Iwanami Bunko…
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What We Mean When We Say “Experience”
The Term That Sounds Like Justice A new vocabulary has entered conversations about education and child welfare. The “experience gap” or “experience disparity” describes…
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The Seriousness Question
Reading Palantir’s Manifesto Through Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and the Postwar Japanese Mind An Unusual Document In April 2026, on the one-year anniversary of The Technological…