My (optimistic) assessment of the current political situation is in today's issue of The Wall Street Journal Asia.You can read it here.
Month: April 2008
The futility of Japan’s global popularity
The BBC has released its annual survey of global attitudes, revealing once again that Japan is one of the most positively rated countries among those surveyed.Jun Okumura provides a good wrap-up of the report's findings on Japan here.As in years past, the survey found that Japan is viewed favorably in just about every country surveyed …
The imperial guard coalesces
It's been less than a week since Prime Minister Fukuda made his eleventh hour appeal to the DPJ to cooperate in the gasoline tax/road construction dispute, discarding much of the road tribe's program in the process and leading Kono Taro to remark (noted here) that the young reformers had gone "from opposition forces to imperial …
Will the real Ozawa please stand up?
I will be the first to admit that I haven't been easy on Ozawa Ichiro in the months since the DPJ won the HC election, not least in published articles.But I just read Mr. Ozawa's poorly titled Ozawashugi — kokorozashi wo motte, nihonjin (Ozawaism: Have ambition, Japanese), in which Mr. Ozawa presents himself as the …
How "sympathetic" should Japan be?
As expected, the governing coalition passed a three-year extension of the sympathy budget in the House of Representatives Wednesday. The House of Councillors now has one month to deliberate on it before it comes into law automatically.And deliberate it will. In the lower house, the DPJ already questioned the use of the sympathy budget to …
April fools?
Today, April 1, the Japanese people have received an April Fool's Day gift in the form of a potentially temporary tax cut on gasoline and automobile purchases. There is, reports the media, chaos at the car dealerships and chaos at the petrol pumps. There is uncertainty regarding current road construction projects. And in a press …
Tobias S. Harris 