First, thank you all for bearing with me. I apologize for the gaps between posts of late — end of the semester and all that. Normal coverage will resume as soon as my time allows (and I will try to sneak a post or two in over the next couple of days on the Ozawa …
Month: May 2009
Now the Ozawa era is over
It appears that Ozawa Ichiro is finally tired of fighting for his political life.After weeks of circling the drain, of calls from members of his own party to resign or clarify his explanation of why his aide was wrongfully accused, Ozawa has decided to call it quits. He will not be resigning from the Diet, …
The LDP’s reformists continue to battle family politics
Surprisingly, given the howls of protest from within the LDP that greeted Suga Yoshihide's proposal to include a ban on hereditary candidates in the party's election manifesto, the LDP appears ready to include restrictions on political inheritances in the manifesto after Suga met with Koga Makoto, the LDP's chief elections strategist, and Ibuki Bunmei, former …
Continue reading The LDP’s reformists continue to battle family politics
A witness to history
Nagao Yasushi, the Mainichi Shimbun photographer who won the Pulitzer Prize for this extraordinary photo of the assassination of Socialist Party leader Asanuma Inejiro by Yamaguchi Otoya, was found dead Saturday. He was seventy-eight. The assassination, which occurred on 12 October 1960 was the capstone on what was perhaps the most momentous year in postwar …
The emergence of Middle Power Asia
Over the past week, we have seen more signs of the shape that international relations in East Asia will take over the coming decades.I've written before about the role that middle powers — most notably Japan, Australia, South Korea, ASEAN acting as a bloc, and to a lesser extent India — will play in the …
Tobias S. Harris 