Frank Jannuzi, Hitachi fellow, China expert, and Democratic staffer at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (on leave), spoke tonight at Temple University Japan on the second Armitage-Nye Report.I'm not going to give a full summary of his talk -- much of it was spelling out the thinking of the report's drafters and explaining the points …
Month: April 2007
Waiting for Wen
It seems that today is a China kind of day, as Chinese Premier Wen begins his three-day visit to Japan today.The much-quoted purpose of this trip is to "melt the ice" between Japan and China.Call me a skeptic, but I think I'm with the Carnegie Endowment's Minxin Pei, who wrote in an op-ed in the …
Is the Bush administration thinking about the China relationship?
With the Bush administration's recent move to press a suit against Chinese violations of intellectual property in the WTO sparking fears of a full-blown Sino-American trade war, I must ask the same questionI asked when the US Commerce Department announced tariffs on Chinese glossy paper: is this administration pursuing a coherent strategy in Asia, or …
Continue reading Is the Bush administration thinking about the China relationship?
Reading the local elections with an eye on July
I have held off from posting on the results of Sunday's local elections because I am not entirely sure what conclusion should be drawn.I think it would be a mistake to draw too-firm conclusions about the prospects for July's Upper House elections from the results.Is Ishihara's reelection a clear precursor of LDP victory in July? …
Continue reading Reading the local elections with an eye on July
The problem with foreign policy
George Washington University's Henry Nau has an essay in Policy Review in which he discusses the challenges posed by debating foreign policy (via RealClearPolitics).I am posting largely without comment, but I want to note that Nau's question is something I've thought about for a while. Ideas about foreign policy depend much more on abstraction and …
The heart of the matter
What Japan Thinks published the results of a survey by the Cabinet Office of what the Japanese people think about their society.In part two, posted here, the survey found that approximately 75% of respondents answered in the negative to the question "do you think the government takes into consideration its citizens' opinions and thoughts." The …
Asia’s Rip Van Winkle
Georgetown's Casimir Yost, director of Georgetown's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, was in Tokyo last week giving a series of talks. I saw him at the US Embassy's Tokyo American Center on Friday.In the course of his talk, Yost made an interesting point about how the US has been distracted from Asia by Iraq, …
A gift to Bush?
Prime Minister Abe has announced the formation of a special study group chaired by former Japanese ambassador to the US Yanai Shunji to study rolling back restrictions on Japan's exercise of its right of collective self-defense in limited cases, including, according to the Yomiuri Shimbun, (1) the use of missile defense to destroy a ballistic …
I love the smell of nuance in the morning
Robert Koehler of The Marmot's Hole writes of a talk by Park Yu-ha, a Korean professor of Japanese literature, at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, in which she argued that Koreans are also to blame for the comfort women system.And hence my problem with the congressional resolution condemning Japan and only Japan. History is …
The healing power of Dice-K?
Perhaps the baseball gods are smiling on the US-Japan relationship, with wunderkind Matsuzaka Daisuke's first start for the Red Sox a masterful performance.What better way for the allies to change the subject away from all that nastiness about comfort women and North Korean nuclear weapons? State Department spokesman and Red Sox fan Sean McCormack evidently, …
Tobias S. Harris 