Following pronouncements against Chinese war museums and the congressional comfort women resolution, Japan's hyper-nationalists have turned their attention once again to the Nanjing Massacre, arguing as before that "only" 20,000 people were killed in Nanjing, as opposed to the generally accepted range of 150,000-200,000 (IHT here; Japan Times here).The quibbling over numbers is one of …
Continue reading The hyper-nationalist spring offensive continues
I could not help asking that question — paraphrasing Richard Nixon's famous pronouncement — read a pair of articles that look at how post-industrial global capitalism is evolving, and how publics, especially in the US and other mature democracies, are responding to the emergent order.In Foreign Affairs, Kenneth Scheve and Matthew Slaughter, noting the rise …
It seems that in the aftermath of "The Facts" advert in the Washington Post, the House Foreign Affairs committee is prepared to move forward (Hat tip: Japan Probe) with the Honda resolution on the comfort women issue — and that there is something to the news emanating from Korean sources that Vice President Cheney in …
Michael Auslin, a history professor at Yale and soon to be scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has a somewhat challenging survey of contemporary Japan at American.com, AEI's online magazine.As the article's title — "A Beautiful Country" — suggests, Auslin buys into the confident rhetoric that has emanated from Tokyo in recent years, but at …
Korea's Chosun Ilbo reports that the US government — both Congress and the White House — are not pleased by the ad published in the Washington Post signed by Japanese legislators that lays out "the facts" of the comfort women issue (previously discussed here). While the Chosun Ilbo relies on an unnamed source in Washington …
With Prime Minister Abe turning his attention and blame to the hapless bureaucrats in the Social Insurance Agency — those bureaucrats who have served as the fly in his constitution revision ointment — the Japan Times published a piece by Philip Brasor discussing the actual conditions within the agency, and the bureaucrats who lorded over …
Continue reading Death of the 1955 system? Greatly exaggerated.
Yesterday I finally made it to see Soda Kazuhiro's acclaimed documentary Senkyo [rendered in English as Campaign], in which he followed a university friend, Yamauchi Kazuhiko, as he campaigned as the LDP candidate for a city council seat in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture. (The film's official site can be viewed here.)Filmed with one camera and lacking …
Although the comfort women resolution appears to be on hold until after Japan holds Upper House elections next month, the waters have been roiled by a full-page advert in the Washington Post taken out by a bipartisan group of Japanese legislators, as well as journalists and commentators (including Abe confidante Okazaki Hisahiko) laying out "The …
Continue reading The nationalism question, revisited yet again
This week it seems Wan Gang, a non-CCP party member (he belongs to the nominally independent China Party for the Public Interest), became the first non-communist cabinet minister in decades. The People's Daily noted that Wan views his appointment as an important step in the development of democracy in China.Wan is undoubtedly being overoptimistic in …
Continue reading At the frontier of political thought in China
The LDP-Komeito coalition, after weeks of wrangling with the DPJ, passed its version of a law revising the Political Funds Control Law over DPJ opposition.The law stipulates that politicians' fund management organizations are to copy and provide receipts for expenditures above ¥50,000. Will it make any difference in stopping political corruption? In a word, no. …
Tobias S. Harris 