The DPJ is transitioning into power, and Hatoyama Yukio is doing burasagari press conferences again after not doing them during the campaign.(For those wondering what burasagari means, it simply refers to impromptu press conferences given by politicians to reporters as the politicians walk to or from, say, a car. The term, which means "hanging" or …
Tag: globalization
Hatoyama in the New York Times
There isn't much I can add to MTC's comments on the New York Times's publication of the translation of Hatoyama Yukio's essay in Voice (which originally appeared in the Christian Science Monitor). I am stunned that no one at DPJ HQ thought better of having Hatoyama's provocative essay appear — again — in an American …
Hatoyama is a problem for the DPJ
In the current issue of the Economist, the news magazine calls particular attention to comments by Hatoyama Yukio in an article in the September issue of Voice called "My Political Philosophy." (I've gotten so accustomed to Japanese magazines not putting content online that I did not even bother to check whether it was.) Hatoyama, the …
What’s in a name?
With his party's launch scheduled for 8 August, Watanabe Yoshimi has finally revealed its name.Minna no tō.Apparently the official English translation will be "Your Party." I'm not sure which is worse, the name in the original Japanese or its translation. I realize that Japanese parties have run the gamut when it comes to names, and …
The world’s top public intellectual
Voting is open in Foreign Policy magazine and Prospect magazine's contest to choose the world's top public intellectual.The magazines chose a list of the top 100, available here, on the basis of the following criteria: "Although the men and women on this list are some of the world’s most sophisticated thinkers, the criteria to make …
"Pride" is not just the property of the LDP
In this post earlier this month, I discussed the importance of "pride" — hokori (誇り) — in the thinking of the Japanese right.In this vein, Younghusband at Coming Anarchy writes of a dispute between the DPJ and The Economist over the recent cover that featured the pun "Japain."Iwakuni Tetsundo, head of the DPJ's international bureau, …
Continue reading "Pride" is not just the property of the LDP
Japan on the brink
The Diet returned to business yesterday after a two-day recess, with Prime Minister Fukuda and members of his cabinet delivering speeches outlining the government's basic policies for the 2008 regular session.Prime Minister Fukuda — despite his decline in popularity, which he has said "can't be helped" — gave another excellent speech, his second in two …
Fear and loathing in the global economy
Every once in a while, I read an article that is worth posting largely without comment. Tony Judt, a professor of European history at NYU, has written one such article, a review in the New York Review of Books of Robert Reich's Supercapitalism.The key paragraphs:But we have good reason to believe that this may be …
Don’t panic
Pollster Karlyn Bowman, writing at American.com, presents data on Japanese public opinion drawn from a variety of recent surveys (mostly old Pew Global Attitudes polls).The overall picture — Japanese are generally pleased with relations with the US, displeased about the rise of China — is not altogether surprising, although some findings were unexpected.First, in response …
Are we all social democrats now?
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 …
Tobias S. Harris 