Robert C Neff, who was at the center of America’s debate about a rapidly rising Japan in the late 1980s, died on July 31, 2024, at his home in Hayama, Japan, south of Tokyo, after a long illness. He was 77 years old. He is survived by his wife of more than 40 years, Fumiko […]

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John McBeth, Journalist: 1944-2023 New Zealand-born John McBeth, one of Asia’s pre-eminent journalists with a record of scrupulous and ground-breaking reporting, has died after a short illness. He was 79. Over a career spanning more than 62 years, McBeth’s reporting helped shape events in countries including South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia. I […]

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Henry Kissinger was the ultimate champion of the United States’ foreign-policy battles. The former US secretary of state died on November 29, 2023, after living for a century. The magnitude of his influence on the geopolitics of the free world cannot be overstated. From World War II, when he was an enlisted soldier in the […]

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In a way I should credit Silvio Berlusconi, who has died at the age of 86, with doing one good thing, at least for me personally: He kindled in me an enduring addiction to all things Italian. He did so, however, for bad reasons: Why, I wanted to know once this passion began in 2001 […]

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The death at 88 of Japanese writer and Nobel prize winner Kenzaburō Ōe on March 3 leaves a deep wound in his readers – and in the Japanese community, which has lost one of its most powerful voices and critics. Ōe was a literary giant. In Japan open political discussion and participation is discouraged and […]

The post Kenzaburō Ōe: a writer of real humanity, the real Japan appeared first on Asia Times.

Shoichiro Toyoda, president of Toyota Motor from 1982 to 1992 and chairman from 1992 to 1999, passed away February 14. He was 97. Dr Toyoda (he held a doctorate in engineering and everybody called him doctor) was one of the first auto executives I interviewed upon moving to Japan in the mid-1980s. Little did I […]

The post Shoichiro Toyoda, 1925-2023: a personal remembrance  appeared first on Asia Times.

Vladimir Putin’s former adviser and spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky, who has died aged 71, was once described as “Putin’s Karl Rove.” He was the man who got things done in the Kremlin, like Rove did for his political master, George W Bush. Pavlovsky – a dissident turned apparatchik turned dissident again – was at the […]

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In another life he would have been a poet or a rock star. In this one Mike Tharp was a reporter’s reporter with a poet’s heart and a magnetic vibe that pulled into his orbit colleagues, friends and complete strangers who wanted some of that life force for themselves. Michael Eugene Tharp, universally known as […]

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Legendary journalist Nathaniel Talbott Thayer, who had reported for Asia Times among other publications, died in his sleep last week at the age of 62 at his home in Massachusetts after a long illness. Following is the obituary posted by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand: Nothing was normal about Thayer. He was a staunchly independent […]

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By the summer of 1989, a series of problems threatened China’s stability. Soaring inflation was undermining the economy at home while the violent suppression of Tiananmen Square demonstrations had left it largely a pariah state abroad. Yet within a few years the nation rebounded – beginning two decades of high economic growth, membership in the […]

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Much used to be made of the fact that the man who became known as Kim Il Sung had been named Kim Song Ju at birth. Kim Il Sung was his nom de guerre, acquired in the 1930s in Manchuria. Some reports suggested that other anti-Japanese figures before him may have called themselves Kim Il […]

The post Dae-Sook Suh, Kim Il Sung’s biographer, dead at 90 appeared first on Asia Times.

From the very beginning, Queen Elizabeth II’s reign was deeply connected to Britain’s global empire and the long and bloody processes of decolonization. Indeed, she became Queen while on a royal visit to Kenya in 1952. After she left, the colony descended into one of the worst conflicts of the British colonial period. Declaring a […]

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Kazuo Inamori, the founder and chairman emeritus of Kyocera – a top rank Japanese maker of electronic components, devices and materials – passed away at his home in Kyoto on August 24. He was 90 years old. Inamori was one of Japan’s most outstanding entrepreneurs and business executives, making his mark as a managerial innovator, […]

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Few world leaders have cut a more consequential but ultimately tragic figure than Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, whose death at the age of 91 has been announced by Russian state media. In a way, it was fitting that as the last leader of the USSR, Gorbachev was probably its only truly humane one. And it’s equally […]

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JAKARTA – It was dusk when photojournalist Tim Page pulled into a village deep in the mountains of northern Thailand. It had been a long day shooting opium poppies, but he had a roll of new fast film and in his mind was an image of an old man smoking an opium pipe by the […]

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YANGON – Myanmar’s foremost beverage and media tycoon Thein Tun, who was once seen as a “godfather” in the old world of crony business, has died aged 85. After decades of business in the beer, banking, media, retail and property industries, the octogenarian passed away in Bangkok on April 18, local media reported. Thein Tun […]

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Madeleine Albright may have not coined the phrase “indispensable nation,” but she will always be associated with the concept. By the time she became Secretary of State in 1997, the United States had become a beached superpower. During the Cold War, its forces had been deployed across the world for the explicit purpose of deterring […]

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As China emerged from the years of the Cultural Revolution in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, many voices emerged in the national and international arena. They were all sounds of the edges of society, the new margins of the swamps, the new Brigands as if from the classical novel The Water Margins 水浒传, far […]

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TOKYO – “Until I die, I will say what I want, do what I want and I want to be hated by people when I die,” Shintaro Ishihara, former governor of Tokyo, said at a press conference on his retirement from political life in December of 2014. There has rarely been a politician in Japan […]

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I read with sadness of the passing of the great novelist and politician Shintaro Ishihara on February 1 at the age of 89.   As a writer, I had long been interested in Ishihara’s career. I  had read the book Taiyo No Kisetsu, which won Ishihara the Akutagawa award at age 24, and launched his remarkable […]

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