The Japan Times

BANGKOK – An isolated murder, a brutal attempted killing and a murky disappearance: Laotian activists have been caught up in a series of alarming incidents recently that have spooked the reclusive communist state’s embattled dissident community. Landlocked, poor and deeply tied to China, Laos is one of ...

CHIANG KHONG, Thailand: From February to April each year, Kam Thon spends most of her days knee-deep in the waters of the Mekong River by her village in northern Thailand, gathering river weed to sell and cook at home. Kam Thon and other women who live ...

The Mekong River originates in China and winds its way south, flowing through or past five other countries — Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam — before it empties into the South China Sea. The Mekong is the beating heart of the region, and while ...

Ninety-seven kilometers of rocks in Thai waters stand between Beijing and dominance over the Mekong, a mighty river that feeds millions as it threads south from the Tibetan Plateau through five countries before emptying into the South China Sea. China has long wanted to dredge the ...

Battling drought, debt and ailments blamed on pesticides, rice farmers in northern Thailand have turned to eco-friendly growing methods despite powerful agribusiness interests in a country that is one of the top exporters of the grain in the world. Walking through a sea of green waist-high ...

River systems help sustain lives and livelihoods. But, thanks to excessive damming and drastic overuse of their water resources, some rivers are drying up before reaching the sea. Nowhere is this truer than Asia. Building large dams has increasingly run into grassroots opposition in established democracies ...

Chinese drug police are working with Mekong countries to strike at the heart of a mega-rich meth syndicate as the region targets top-level drug traffickers instead of street dealers. The porous and lawless border areas of Myanmar, Thailand and Laos have for decades been a hub ...

The leaders of five Mekong countries and Japan held the 10th Mekong-Japan Summit on Tuesday in Tokyo, issuing a joint statement afterwards that pledged cooperation on the promotion of development programs and further improvement on “connectivity” and “quality infrastructure” projects in the region. Keep reading ...

Top diplomats from Japan and five Southeast Asian countries along the Mekong River have pledged to maintain U.N. economic sanctions aimed at pressuring North Korea to achieve complete denuclearization as promised. The agreement Friday came amid growing concern that countries friendly to North Korea, such as ...

Japan’s economic and technical support for building bridges and improving roads and other transport infrastructure around Indochina was praised at a meeting of the Mekong-Japan Cooperation Forum in Cambodia on Friday. Keep reading ...