In the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's (SIPRI) 2008 yearbook, released earlier this month, Japan ranked fifth in military expenditures (valued at $43.6 billion in market exchange rate terms and amounting to 4% of total world military expenditures), behind the USA, the UK, China, and France.But it turns out that Japan also ranked fifth in …
Tag: Japan
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 …
Matsuoka Toshikatsu, RIP
Beleaguered Agriculture Minister Matsuoka Toshikatsu was found dead by his own hand this afternoon.I am somewhat hesitant to comment on the political ramifications, seeing as how this is a grim end to a sordid affair (and career); but it demands some response. Obviously I mean no disrespect to those grieving. This is a terrible end, …
Japan’s revenge
Over at Project Syndicate, Thomas Palley outlines the argument about how the yen carry trade is fuelling global asset bubbles — although Finance Minister Omi denies that Japan's low interest rates are the cause of the carry trade.Aside from rehearsing the standard arguments about how Japan's barely-over-zero interest rates contributes to global instability and the …
UN tells Japan to tend its own garden
That's the message one could conclude from criticism of Japan by the UN Committee Against Torture, calling attention to Japan's justice and prison system, and even criticized Japan for dismissing comfort women cases on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired.As the FT's David Turner writes:The report comes at an embarrassing time for …
The revisionists ascendant
Western commentators who only intermittently pay attention to Japan seem to be befuddled by the Japanese constitution. They seem to have a hard time grasping the difficulties associated with changing it, the totemic significance it has been made to bear by both pacifists and revisionists — and thus tend to assume that revision is easy, …
Japan’s own Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
The Abe Cabinet, in the interest of promoting a more globalized and more competitive Japanese economy, has announced that it will seek to repeal Japan's equivalent to the US New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, which was repealed in the US in 1999 with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act. (The FT's coverage can be read here.)The …
Constitution revision — still a long way away
The big story out of Japan today, aside from Chinese Premier Wen's final day in Japan, spent visiting Kyoto, is that the Lower House's Special Investigative Committee on the Constitution passed the LDP draft of a national referendum bill that is a critical precursor to constitution revision.A massive piece of legislation (printed in its entirety …
Continue reading Constitution revision — still a long way away
Support for constitution revision falls
At least that's what the latest Yomiuri Shimbun poll on constitution revision revealed.The results of the poll should serve as a reminder to the Abe Cabinet, Japan's neighbors, and the world at large that the politics of Japan's normalization are far from simple.While the survey has shown a consistent plurality in favor of constitution revision …
Seoul speaks up — how about Washington?
The Jiji wire service carried two articles today that report on South Korean officials criticizing Japan for its focus on the abductions issue in the multilateral de-nuclearization talks.First, Yu Myong-hwan, South Korea's newly appointed ambassador to Japan, said at a press conference with Japanese journalists in Seoul that the resolving the nuclear issue must take …
Tobias S. Harris 