Richard Lloyd Parry
@dicklp
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Asia Editor @thetimes. Author GHOSTS OF THE TSUNAMI etc. Winner @TheWritersPrize. Eighth member of BTS. Agent: @NatFairweather. Views mine, not my employer's.
Tokyo
Joined February 2009
Superb idea. A few years ago I was on a long-haul flight between two screaming, almost demonic children. I pleaded with the stewardess to move me away from them, for the sake of my sanity. She refused on the ridiculous grounds that I am their father.
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“Imagine some fantasy version of Britain, without genuinely elected leaders, in which a one-party state was encroaching on already limited freedoms. Thrown bricks would be the least of it.” My op-ed on Hong Kong.
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“We are lucky that do not face such oppression. We should not judge those in Hong Kong who do. Far from condemning them as thugs, we should support them in their struggle, recognise their courage and salute them for their remarkable restraint.”.
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Those who see moral equivalence between the violence of the Hong Kong protesters and that of the Chinese state have got it badly wrong.
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One of the most intensely discussed questions about Japan’s anti-virus strategy is why, despite having growing capacity, the authorities carry out so few tests. A meeting this morning with a senior official of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party offers a answer to the mystery.
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Rush hour in Tokyo. The subway train stops in the tunnel for a few moments. Absolute silence. In a carriage of 100 or more people, no one speaks, at all. Is there anywhere else in world where this would happen?
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“No one with real power has the guts to admit it, but a few years ago the rest of the world gave up caring about the evils perpetrated by the government of China.” . For those unwilling to pay, @australian is giving away my piece about Hong Kong here.
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“I’m constantly looking through the curtains. I’m afraid I’ll be attacked by a lynch mob of extreme right-wing people. I love Kyoto, but now I don’t feel safe.”. How anger about “overtourism” blighted the life of a British man in Japan’s ancient capital.
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“No one with real power has the guts to admit it, but a few years ago the rest of the world gave up caring about the evils perpetrated by the government of China.” My op-ed on Hong Kong. They used the byline photo in which I am wearing my serious face.
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"This is not an expression of sour anti-Olympic sentiment but the reluctant acknowledgment of a grim truth. People will die if the Tokyo Olympics go ahead. That is not a price that anyone should be asked to pay.". It's time to cancel the Games.
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“It was very, very naive." UK military rugby team visit shrine for war criminals in Japan
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I've written plenty of stories over the years about "landslide" election victories, but I can't remember anything like this before. In the circumstances (a bitter, violent campaign for the right to a peaceful democracy) it couldn't be more dramatic.
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REVEALED: censorship rules for news by #NHK, Japan's public broadcaster #sexslaves #Senkaku
http://t.co/XaxQdyHfOz
http://t.co/XryPrnDs20.
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A 26-year old Hong Kong reporter faces up to 14 years in prison for collecting spent tear gas cartridges as souvenirs.
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Exquisitely conditional words of acknowledgement from Angela Merkel. Compare the cliched verbiage of Theresa May.
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The unique Tsukiji fish market, one of the most exciting in Asia, has been turned into an Olympic car park.
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This is an outstandingly lucid and well focused piece by @RobinBHarding on why Japan’s privatised railways are so good, and Britain’s so rubbish via @financialtimes.
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“At the BBC, the “radio alert transmission system” (Rats), will be activated. Rats, which is also sometimes referred to as “royal about to snuff it”, is near mythical.” 1/3
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"Right up until the official announcement, the authorities will behave as though everything is going to plan. But, like a patient in the late stages of a terminal illness, the point will come when the vital organs begin to shut down."
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I’m very happy that my first book of narrative non-fiction, ‘In the Time of Madness’, has been published in Japanese. It’s a personal account of my experiences reporting on Indonesia in the late 1990s, and the disturbing & terrible events around the fall of the dictator Suharto.
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It's twenty years ago today that Lucie Blackman went missing. She was working at a hostess bar in Tokyo, and went out for the afternoon to meet a customer. She never returned.
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It is, of course, an absurd example of the tail wagging the dog that pandemic strategy should be determined by an excessive bureaucratic rule (that’s me talking, by the way, not the senior LDP official).
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Kaori Yamaguchi, executive member of Japan Olympic Committee, tells The Times of her worries about the reported suicide of JOC employee. “If his death is anything to do with the Olympics … then there’s an obligation to investigate.” .
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The answer is not medical, epidemiological or political (covering up a “hidden epidemic”) but bureaucratic. Because of the status of Covid-19 in the official hierarchy of diseases, anyone found to have it must go to hospital.
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I have great respect for the work of my old friend, @jakeadelstein. So I'm sorry to have to say that his account in @thedailybeast, based on a new Netflix documentary, is a travesty of what happened in the police investigation of the serial rapist and killer, Joji Obara.
Missing: The Case Of Lucie Blackman airs on Netflix tomorrow. Here’s part of the story of how iconoclastic detectives captured a serial rapist devoted to being “evil itself” . @dicklp @justinmccurry @IsabelRTokyo @scribepub @wingcommander1 @bunshun_online.
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For more reasons than one, Lucifer Siu would get my vote if I was enfranchised in Hong Kong’s election this Sunday.
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The rules are going to be changed soon, lapparently - this is something that will happen within local government rather than at the national level. After that, my source expects that rates of testing will quickly increase. .
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@melaniebrockjpn @simondenyer For an ambitious person, though, someone like Seiko Noda, it's a risky thing to take on. What if the whole thing crashes and burns? Not a good line on the CV. Kawabuchi's 84 - he doesn't care. Perhaps his appointment is a hint that the end is near.
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If people are going to get the coronavirus, why should the Olympics be the occasion? If I was going to get sick, if my life was to be put in danger, I'd rather it was because I sat with friends beneath the cherry blossoms, than for the sake of Visa, Dentsu and Yoshihide Suga.
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(I wote a piece about the Tokyo Olympics for @CourrierJapon. I'm not sure that it will work in micro-serialised Twitterised form, but let's see.). One of the heart-breaking responsibilities of managing a pandemic is deciding why people are going to die.
どうしてある行事は犠牲にされ、別の行事の実施は許されるのか。政治家は、こうした決定があたかも「自然」であり、常識にもとづいた合理的な判断の結果であるかのように見せたがる。だが、事情がそこまで単純であることはほとんどない。@dicklp
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A friend wrote to me asking for advice about travel to Japan. She's planning a trip in the spring with her family, and is understandably concerned about the coronavirus outbreak. In case there are other people facing a similar decision, I post here my reply:.
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“These are inconsequential, low-voltage adventures in realms that have been described many times before. But it is difficult to dislike Chris Broad…”. I wrote a review of the affable book by affable @AbroadInJapan. I tried to keep it affable.
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"The games have already lost meaning and are being held just for the sake of them. We have been cornered into a situation where we cannot even stop now. We are damned if we do, and damned if we do not." Kaori Yamaguchi, executive of Japan Olympic Committee.
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Imagine if the same resources that went into testing and quarantining participants in the Olympics were devoted to foreign students and scholars. You could get the lot of them in safely at a fraction of the cost. Whose presence benefits Japan more in the long run?.
Together with colleagues who have spent our careers researching, teaching, and promoting stronger relations with Japan, we have submitted a letter to PM Kishida expressing our profound concern about Japan’s strict border closure for non-citizens (1) .
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Other countries worry about their health care systems being overwhelmed by a surge in pneumonia cases in ICUs. Japan would be overwhelmed by a surge in people who have nothing wrong with them. No surprise at all then that they would want to test as few as possible.
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Consider what would happen then if Japan did carry out mass, “drive-in” type testing such as South Korea did. Tens of thousands of mild and asymptomatic infections would be be revealed - and each one of them would by law have to be quarantined in a hospital bed.
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Today I have been living in Japan for exactly 25 years. I landed on 23 March 1995, three days after the sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway by the apocalyptic cult Aum Shin Rikyo.
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Waterboarding was one of the crimes for which Japanese soldiers were convicted and hanged by Americans after the War. http://t.co/utHpUzA1fm.
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Dear staff of the New York Times. A nasty article upset a lot of people. The debate over this was interesting for a while. Now it's boring. You're starting to come across as self-centred, verging on self-obsessed. The crisis in the US is not about the op-ed pages of a newspaper.
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This is so heartening. British political correspondents stand up against what Japanese journalists have tolerated all these years: the kisha (reporter) club system.
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You can buy anything in Tokyo's famous department store, Tokyu Hands.
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This is every journalist's nightmare: payment by the click. (Especially if you are the kind of journalists responsible for writing about, for example, Japanese politics.).
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Important map and graphic in today's @TheJapanNews1 showing the country's clown population. Kansai has a clown famine http://t.co/DzmMNXvkg2.
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The official answer is that Japan chooses to test people who are at particular risk or showing symptoms (not just people who are worried) and then aggressively isolates “cluster” infections when they occur.
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@drphiliplee1 Denki Bran. Served only in the Kamiya, a bar in the Asakusa district of Tokyo. Battery acid mixed with honey. After drinking it, I performed karaoke versions of David Bowie’s 1983 album ‘Let’s Dance’ for two and half hours, to no one’s delight.
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By definition, any who wants to be a "Covid marshal" should be disqualified from being a Covid marshal. In fact, everyone who applies should be interned until the pandemic has passed.
PM Boris Johnson says "Covid-secure marshals" will help local authorities "ensure social distancing in town and city centres". Updates:
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“People talk about the 10th anniversary as a turning point. But for we who are grieving it’s just one more day to miss our daughter.". I went back to north-east Japan 10 years after the disaster.
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Eighteen months ago, parents of the children who died needlessly in the 2011 tsunami at Okawa Primary School were awarded damages from the local government. The defendants appealed; the result was announced in court today. The authorities lost; the parents won again.
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If you know a fan of intense industrialisation and you’re looking for a Christmas present, Tokyu Hands in Shibuya has this impressive calendar of Kawasaki heavy industry nightscapes.
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I wept with relief when I read this. I think . I think it’s going to be OK.
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No matter your state of health - whether you just have the sniffles, or no symptoms at all - if the test is positive into hospital you go.
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@drphiliplee1 Also Dotori Sul, a North Korean spirit made of acorns. The acorns suffer years of ill treatment in a gulag before they are distilled.
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Lucie Blackman died on 1st July 2000, after being drugged and raped by the serial rapist, Joji Obara. Today would have been her 40th birthday. I’m thinking of Lucie, her parents, Jane and Tim, her sister Sophie, and her family and friends.
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Nothing makes me feel younger, friskier or more overflowing with the fragrant and delicious juices of youth than a Japanese cabinet.
Noriko Horiuchi, 55, and Daishiro Yamagiwa, 53, will get cabinet posts under Kishida. I’m feeling chipper today because Nikkei describes them as “young” (若手).
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“My mother and my father, who loved me and each other, who lived long, rich, lucky lives, and who died timely deaths at the end of them.”. This is a very fine piece of writing.
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This is the description of Intensity (Shindo) 6+: “Impossible to stand; cannot move without crawling.”.
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Last night I had the pleasure of receiving the Japan National Press Club Special Award, mostly for 津波の霊たち, the translation of ‘Ghosts of the Tsunami’. Among the highlights of the evening was an embrace from Kumamon, one of Japan’s pre-eminent plushy character mascots.
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The suppression of the Japanese media is perpetrated by Japanese journalists upon themselves.
One Abe legacy was pressure on the media and a blatant use of carrot-and-stick tactics to silence critical coverage. Japan's access-driven journalism proved unable to resist such tactics (with a few notable exceptions like @ISOKO_MOCHIZUKI). (1)
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About 30 years ago, during one of my early residences in Japan, I bought a copy of @peterpopham's 'Tokyo: The City at the End of the World'. Few books about the city have made such an impression on me or had a greater influence on my thinking.
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Behind the protester lines at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where the police appear to be poised to clear out students who have occupied it since last week.
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I think of Lucie, of her parents, Jane and Tim, and her sister and brother, Sophie and Rupert. She would have been 41 years old. Joji Obara remains in prison, where he is serving a life sentence.
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Still, WHO advice is to “test, test, test”. What harm would there be in using more of the daily capacity of 9000 tests (at the moment there are usually around 1500 tests carried out, lower than most comparable countries)?.
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I’m writing about Trump and sumo and struggling, really struggling, to stop myself typing the words “fleshy behemoths”.
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“I’m personally very concerned about the consequences of holding the Olympics . There are a number of countries that do not have many cases, and a number that don’t have any variants. We should not make the Olympics [an occasion] to spread the virus to these countries.".
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"Having to deal with all the testing, it’s a ball-ache. Everybody has faked PCR tests, I’m sure, to try to go somewhere, because it’s just so hard.”. UK runner @andybutchart91 explains how athletes fake negative virus test results. Awkward for @Tokyo2020.
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Liz Truss, the former British prime minister, has just given a speech in Tokyo about China. It's one of the most explicit calls by a senior politician for the West to gird itself for a new Cold War with Xi Jinping’s China. A few extracts:.
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Superb footage of a pig evading the pigs in Niigata Prefecture in Japan. (Some people say that the fleet of helicopters maintained by the national broadcaster NHK is excessive - but without them, the world would be deprived of images such as this.).
けさ、新潟県燕市の住宅街でイノシシ１頭が見つかり、用水路に逃げ込んで現在も捕まっておらず、警察は付近の住民に注意を呼びかけています。.警察などが網などを使って捕獲を試みたものの、待ち構える警察官をすり抜けて逃げ続けています。.
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Aung San Suu Kyi to @fergalkeane47: I'm no Mother Teresa. (The problem is that she's no Aung San Suu Kyi, either.)
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It is too early to conclude that Japan’s anti-virus strategy has been successful.
Having read all the mtg logs, tweets, press conf materials of the Japanese govt's #COVID19 task force/experts panel over the past weeks, it is striking to see how much foreign media have, unfortunately, failed to effectively depict Japan's science-based strategy. 1/n.
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“Japan is the best place to be among the industrialised nations. It”s difficult to explain & difficult to believe. As terrible news comes in from the rest of the world, it feels like a fairyland into which grim reality is liable 2 explode at any moment.”
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Festive confusion in Tokyo: a Christmas tree bedecked for Hallowe’en.
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Young protesters holding out at Hong Kong Polytechnic University have been discussing the possibility of killing themselves rather then submitting to arrest, following a string of suicides by democracy activists.
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I found this strange arrangement of discarded cicada (aburazemi) skins on the trunk of a tree in Yoyogi Park. Like a parliament, or a Black Mass, of insectkind. It’s the first time that I have seen this.
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Interesting branding: a Tokyo hotel for those who are sick and tired of a good night’s rest and crave the gift of sleeplessness.
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The widely disseminated notion that masks are "completely useless" will be seen in time to have been a reckless cock-up & a con. It's so obvious. If they help doctors & nurses, how can they fail to help the rest (even if they're not a perfect shieid)?
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So far at least, the inter-Korean summit is an illustration of the power and even beauty of political choreography. Moon Jae-in has such class and low-key elegance. Compare Trump, flicking mock dandruff off Emmanuel Macron.
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At current rates, it will take 126 years to vaccinate the Japanese population.
With vaccine program in disarray, Japan faces new battle to contain variants
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#Okinawa Peace Museum doesn't mince words about "comfort women" on the island - they were Koreans, recruited by force http://t.co/CmbuI1BN1W.
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