Jason Morgan

    Last month, I reported on the efforts of a Japanese prolifer named Sasaki Kazuo.  (https://humanlifereview.com/if-they-only-knew/) When I interviewed Sasaki in early April, he was staging a hunger strike at the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in downtown... Read More →

  It’s the afternoon of April 6, Holy Thursday, when I call Sasaki Kazuo. He answers the phone and I am immediately taken aback. His speech is slightly slurred, his words rushing together as if he were willing himself to speak. Just a few days before he had left a voicemail... Read More →

  In her important new book Dollars for Life, Mary Ziegler, the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California-Davis School of Law (formerly at Florida State University College of Law), traces how American prolifers of various descriptions and... Read More →

  There’s an old fable in Japan titled Ubasuteyama, or “Throw-Away-Grandma Mountain.” There are two versions. The one I know best is as follows: There’s a mountain—Throw-Away-Grandma Mountain—where people from a nearby village abandon their aged parents when the parents can... Read More →

  The term “fashion victim” came into vogue during my lifetime. It was apparently first used by Oscar de la Renta (1932-2014) to describe people who try too hard to keep up with the latest design trends. Perhaps you’ve seen such poor souls, thoroughbred clotheshorses who... Read More →

Monozukuri (ものづくり) is one of the most important concepts in the Japanese cultural universe. The straight translation of monozukuri is deceptively simple: literally, “making things.” But in practice it is so much more than that. My colleague Rebecca Chunghee Kim at Ritsumeikan... Read More →

  Pastor Tsujioka Kenzo passed away on December 16. He was eighty-nine years old.  My friend and fellow pro-life advocate Vincent Kato let me know as soon as he found out. Just a week before, Vincent had shared photos of a Prolife Japan Christmas gathering with me. Pastor... Read More →

  The “red wave,” amplified in some quarters into a “red tsunami,” never materialized. The day after the November midterms, pundits on television shows across the political spectrum fidgeted in their chairs—wrong yet again. For prolifers, the political turmoil of the past... Read More →

  One afternoon in mid-October, I found myself sitting alone at a long table at the front of a big conference room in the House of Councillors office building in the Nagatachō district of downtown Tokyo. A pro-life group called Seimei Sonchō Sentā (Respect Life Center) had... Read More →

  A few months ago, my wife and I did a rare thing for us—we went out to see a movie. A documentary about Audrey Hepburn was playing at the arthouse cinema across town, and, as a movie theater had been out of the question during the Covid years, we jumped at the chance to... Read More →