I'll be leaving shortly for Japan. Regular blogging will resume soon.
Category: Observing Japan Blog
These are the hollow men
"Shape without form, shade without colour,/Paralysed force, gesture without motion" — T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"The belabored departure of Hatoyama Kunio — captured well with a quote from a more contemporary poet at Shisaku — and now the third straight defeat of an LDP candidate in a prominent mayoral election suggest that what little remained …
Is Japan balancing?
"Randy Waterhouse," the nom de blog of a contributor to the political science group blog Duck of Minerva, looks to Japan in a discussion of when and why states balance against other states.As I wrote in April, the lack of Japanese balancing behavior is the great puzzle in Japanese security policy since the end of …
Pushback on preemption
Prime Minister Asō Tarō and a group of national security hawks in the LDP may be pushing hard for the inclusion of preemptive capabilities in this year's National Defense Program Guidelines (NDPG), but it appears that while there is little opposition from within the LDP, the Aso government may yet have some difficulty getting its …
The battle for "reform"
In remarkably little time, the LDP has swung from doomed to ebullient and now once again is showing its age and fragility. And all it took was a nominal change in leadership in the DPJ.Suga Yoshihide and Nakagawa Hidenao's campaign to ban hereditary politics from the LDP has proved to be immensely detrimental for Aso …
Playing games
After consultations among the governing parties, the Aso government has extended the current session of the Diet for fifty-five days, with 28 July the final day of the marathon session.Ostensibly, the government wants time to pass the supplementary budget-related bills and the anti-piracy bill. But, as Asahi reports, the government only needs to wait until …
Separated by a common enemy
Already under consideration before North Korea's nuclear test last week, the LDP's push to include plans for an indigenous capability to strike North Korea to preempt an attack on Japan has picked up speed over the past week. On May 26th, Prime Minister Aso Taro reminded reporters that since 1955 preemptive self-defense has been considered …
Summer travel
I will be in Japan this summer, from mid-June to mid- or late August — hopefully I will be around for the general election.As always, I am interested in meeting with readers.
More on the Roos appointment
Considering the appointment of John Roos and other Obama donors to ambassadorial posts, David Rothkopf makes a strong argument against the relevance of ambassadorships in the first place:For really important relationships, we need permanent high-level representation. But those relationships are comparatively few and in those cases, we need a special breed of highly empowered, highly …
Party A vs. Party B
Maehara Seiji, the former DPJ president who has been viewed as a possible defector from the DPJ, said in a TV appearance Thursday evening that "even if the DPJ loses the election, it will absolutely not break apart." I have long been skeptical of the willingness of Maehara and his fellow conservatives to defect from …
Tobias S. Harris 