Prime Minister Fukuda, originally scheduled to visit Germany, Britain, and France as well as Russia during the Japanese political world's Golden Week holiday in early May, has changed his plans, announcing that he will be restricting his travels to a trip to Russia 25-27 April to meet with Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. The reason …
Continue reading The domestic constraints on Japanese foreign policy
The BBC has released its annual survey of global attitudes, revealing once again that Japan is one of the most positively rated countries among those surveyed.Jun Okumura provides a good wrap-up of the report's findings on Japan here.As in years past, the survey found that Japan is viewed favorably in just about every country surveyed …
In the year since Funabashi Yoichi, editor-in-chief of the Asahi Shimbun, finished The Peninsula Question, the US and North Korea made an agreement that restarted the Six-Party talks, overcame the Banco Delta Asia obstacle, and issued a joint statement with the other parties that included a promise by North Korea to account for its nuclear …
Continue reading Recommended Book: The Peninsula Question, Yoichi Funabashi
Continuing the theme of Japan's vanishing global presence discussed in this post (and this post by Gen Kanai last week), it's worth looking at what may be this year's hot foreign policy article-turned-book (cf. Paul Kennedy, Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kagan), "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony" by Parag Khanna, a fellow at the New America …
As the Fukuda government has insisted at every chance it has to remind Japanese citizens and foreign governments that the focus of this summer's G8 summit in Hokkaido will be climate change policy. Tokyo is eager to be at the forefront of the quest for a post-Kyoto climate change pact.This weekend Mr. Fukuda took this …
Continue reading The weakness of Fukuda’s (and Japan’s) carbon campaign
Much has been made among English-language bloggers about Mr. Fukuda's delivering a version of his New Year's message in English at the LDP's YouTube channel, the launch of which I discussed in this post. (Asia Exile; TPR; Japundit)Steven Clemons at The Washington Note took one of his occasional forays into matters Japanese to comment on …
Continue reading The real meaning of Fukuda’s New Year’s message
Sankei's Komori Yoshihisa, arch-conservative and China hawk, has published at his blog a list of complaints about Prime Minister Fukuda's visit to China last week, criticizing the prime minister for failing to criticize China for every perceived and actual failing of the Chinese Communist Party.Sounding much like his American peers, including the Washington Times's Bill …
Fukuda Yasuo is in China, and the contrasts, both with his earlier trip to Washington and Ozawa Ichiro's trip to China, are stunning, if not surprising.Recall how earlier this month I criticized Mr. Ozawa for his over-the-top visit to Beijing, when he traveled with an entourage of hundreds and spoke in effusive terms about the …
Over at 空, Ken Tanaka wonders about my criticism of Mr. Ozawa's remarks in China in this post, echoing the questions of several commentators to the same post.Let me be clear: Japan has no choice but to have cordial and constructive relations with China, the same as for the United States, Australia, India, and other …
Despite the extension of the Diet session, Ozawa Ichiro, DPJ president, will still be going to China with nearly fifty DPJ members of the Diet from 6 to 8 December. Mr. Ozawa will meet with Hu Jintao and mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations.Mr. Ozawa's visit comes just as turbulence in …
Tobias S. Harris 