The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has issued statistics regarding early voting for Sunday's Upper House elections.The ministry's report found that early voting is up more than 50% from 2004, rising from approximately 260,000 votes to nearly 400,00 votes, with higher tallies recorded in every prefecture except Miyazaki and Kochi.Mainichi concludes that the increase …
Year: 2007
Missing the point on Japan’s normalization
Using the occasion of Japanese Air Self-Defense Force pilots participating in live-bombing exercises with the US in the Marianas, Norimitsu Onishi of the New York Times has a prominently featured article in today's edition (also on the front page, top of the fold of today's IHT) on Japan's shedding "military restraints."The NYT website also features …
Brave old world
Robert Kagan has come out with a new essay that is decidedly less revolutionary than his earlier "Of Power and Paradise," which captured the mood of the 2003 transatlantic feud.In this new essay in Policy Review, Kagan comes to a realization about the nature of American power and world order that others have been arguing …
A journey to the center of Mr. Abe
I mentioned earlier that I was in the process of reading Prime Minister Abe's Utsukushii Kuni e [Towards a beautiful country], the book he published in advance of last autumn's LDP presidential election and that was a popular seller after his inauguration as the Japanese people tried to figure out just who their new prime …
Thinking about Japanese democracy
With the Upper House elections now a week away, it is worthwhile to step back and think about Japan's political system. At least that's what I did recently, reading Bradley Richardson's Japanese Democracy: Power, Coordination, and Performance — this month's recommended book.Published in 1997, Richardson's book is obviously not the place to go for analysis …
Viva the lifestyle restoration!
Jun Okumura gives a thorough fisking to a BBC article that completely misses what's actually going on in this election campaign. In fact, the article seems to be little more than a bundle of cliches strung together with, as Jun notes, a few illustrative anecdotes.All the BBC had to do to get this story right …
Who misses Koizumi more, the Japanese people or the foreign press?
This week's Economist and today's FT both carry articles discussing the shadow cast by former Prime Minister Koizumi over the Upper House elections — and over his hapless and, according to Mr. Koizumi, kawaiso successor.I have no doubt that there are segments of public opinion and sections of the LDP that would be glad to …
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The white-hot rage of the ultra-nationalists
From the blog of Sakurai Yoshiko, newscaster and lady of the right, comes the text of her article in the 7 July issue of Shukan Daiyamondo concerning the comfort women resolution.Hers is another contribution to the fury of Japanese ultra-nationalists that is spilled across the pages of Japan's weeklies and monthlies as the congressional resolution …
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The time for choosing approaches
North Korea has indicated that in order for the six-party talks to go forward, the US will have to remove North Korea from its list of state supporters of terrorism. That demand, of course, is aimed squarely at US-Japan cooperation on the abductions issue, because Japan is adamant that so long as North Korea fails …
Rural Japan, elections, and political change
Over at the Social Science Japan forum maintained by the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo — the subdued, scholarly alternative to NBR's US-Japan forum — Paul Midford of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology has sparked an interesting discussion, subsequently contributed to by Ethan Scheiner of UC-Davis (and author of …
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Tobias S. Harris 