James Auer, director of Vanderbilt's Center for US-Japan Studies and Cooperation, spoke tonight at Temple University Japan to a large audience composed of US and Japanese diplomats and policymakers, scholars, and others interested in the US-Japan alliance.Auer is one of the elder statesmen of the alliance, having served in Japan while in the US Navy …
Author: Tobias S. Harris
Tobias Harris is Japan analyst at Teneo Intelligence. He is the author of a forthcoming biography of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
That sinking feeling
It's a new month, the Diet session has wound down, and there is less than a month until the Upper House elections (and ten days to kouji, when candidates officially file, marking the beginning of the official campaign season).And to start the month off right, here's the result of a recent Mainichi poll showing that …
After the Yoshida Doctrine, what?
Over at Shisaku, MTC notes in a thoughtful post on the Yoshida Doctrine, "Yet even now, sixteen years down the line, the Yoshida tradeoff rules as the master narrative underpinning all discussion of Japan's security options."Yet I wonder if the Yoshida Doctrine lives on only as a function of the institutional and constitutional constraints that …
The caudillo candidate
Mainichi has published an account of an interview with Alberto Fujimori, former president of Peru now under house arrest in Santiago, Chile and recently named to Kokumin Shinto's proportional representation list.In it, Fujimori promises to return to Peru, and notes that running for office in Japan does not mean the end of his political career …
Can anyone say straw man?
Komori Yoshihisa, defender of Japan's honor Sankei Shimbun's editor at large based in Washington, has "exposed" the alleged activities of Chinese-American groups in putting the screws on House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D-CA-12) and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA-8) to get them both to support rapid passage of the comfort women …
A cure for Japan’s fear of Democrats
While Asia has been largely absent from debates among Republican and Democratic candidates for their respective parties' presidential nominations — much to my chagrin — the Washington Post reports that John Hamre of CSIS organized a dinner for Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo to meet with the foreign policy advisers of a number of …
Learning to be self-reliant?
If I could draw, I would have drawn something exactly like this cartoon in today's Yomiuri:The caption on this cartoon reads, "Troubles at home, worries in America," Abe's dual American "worries" being the looming comfort women resolution and Christopher Hill's nuclear bargaining.It didn't need to be this way, did it? As I wrote last week, …
"No comment" — too little, too late?
The comfort women resolution has passed the House Committee on Foreign Affairs by a vote of 39 to 2. It now moves on to the full House, where Speaker Pelosi has suggested it will be considered in mid-July, conveniently before the Upper House elections.The Abe government's response: no comment. Adhering to the sensible position that …
Speaking of campaign advertisements…
The LDP has produced its campaign CM (easier than trying to say commercial, I guess).It is available here, at the LDP website.Abe Shinzo. Pomp and Circumstance. Economic growth.I really don't think further comment is necessary. At some point it just gets to be overkill.
For the DPJ, the worse the better
With the Upper House elections little over a month away and public outrage over the pensions scandal seemingly unassuaged, the DPJ has found another angle to emphasize the government's indifference to the plight of the average Japanese citizen.A comic strip, available online here, is being distributed to voters in a flier, the cover of which …
Tobias S. Harris 