In a 2005 debate, law professor Doug Cassel asked John Yoo the following question:

If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo’s response? “No treaty.”

Also in 2005, Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, asked Yoo the following question:

… you are telling me that you would tell your client, the president of the United States, ‘You may order pulling out somebody’s fingernails. You may order having somebody’s family member killed in front…

Despite its record of homogeneity, Japan has a foreign-born population of about 2.8 million people (recorded in June 2019), a number which has steadily increased year after year. Due to its aging population, the Japanese government has seen the need to loosen immigration requirements to attract people from overseas whose contributions to the Japanese tax and pension systems are desperately needed. These foreigners run the socio-economic gamut. And in a time of crisis, they too deserve the same assistance the Japanese government is prepared to offer native Japanese taxpayers.

While Japan has not yet felt the impact of the COVID-19…

If the former NYC mayor becomes the nominee, the Democratic Party will not survive

What if I told you the left wing and the right wing belong to the same bird?

This famous saying appears on dozens, if not hundreds of memes, and it’s something of a mantra among those who feel left out by both the Democratic and Republican Parties.

The concept of “the two parties are basically the same” has always felt ridiculous to me. …

One of the best things about the advent of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program is it has given writers and readers alike the chance to explore genres that traditional publishing might consider too niche to take a chance on. While the big publishers are more concerned with the broadest possible market for a book, independent authors and publishers have lower costs, and with that comes the freedom to experiment a bit more. Western, LitRPG, harem/reverse harem, gaslamp, sea adventure, dinosaur erotica…these books probably wouldn’t get a second look by an acquisitions editor these days. …

The debut of Tidying Up With Marie Kondo on Netflix has riled up a number of book lovers in western society. Kondo says she personally keeps less than thirty books and this turned bibliophiles into an enraged Internet mob. One of the most vocal was author Anakana Schofield, who wrote an article in The Guardian about how Kondo was wrong.

As someone who has been living in Japan for around ten years, the backlash against Kondo was surprising to me. …

Of all the stupid, ridiculous alternatives to gun control, Donald Trump’s latest idea of arming teachers ranks among the dumbest. And I’ll tell you why.

I’m a teacher and have been for almost eleven years. Though have spent most of my teaching career in Japan, I worked for a year in US high school. I’m 5'8", so there were definitely kids who were bigger and stronger than me. Sometimes I’d have to help break up fights between students. When I did, these kids had their adrenaline up. They’d try to pull away while I tried to hold them back.

Now…

As an American who lives in Japan, I pay close attention to what’s happening in my neighborhood. And by my neighborhood, I mean Asia as a whole. I follow Japanese politics almost as closely as I follow American politics.

And right now, Donald Trump is making extremely dangerous and inflammatory statements.

The Japan Times has just reported that over the recent months while discussing the threat posed by North Korea, Trump lamented that Japan didn’t shoot down the missiles. To quote the article:

The U.S. president said he could not understand why a country of samurai warriors did not shoot…