Your humble blogger was invited to attend a media roundtable with Lieutenant General Edward Rice, United States Air Force, the commander of US Forces Japan (previously discussed here), the sole "new media" representative sitting around a table with wire service correspondents and reporters from the major Japanese newspapers and TV networks.The meeting wasn't General Rice's …
Continue reading General Rice criticizes the Japanese media (implicitly)
As expected, the governing coalition passed a three-year extension of the sympathy budget in the House of Representatives Wednesday. The House of Councillors now has one month to deliberate on it before it comes into law automatically.And deliberate it will. In the lower house, the DPJ already questioned the use of the sympathy budget to …
Chalk up another first for the Japanese political system.For the first time since it was created in 1978, the "sympathy budget" by which Japan subsidizes the presence of US forces in Japan will not be passed before the end of the fiscal year, due to demands from the DPJ for more thorough deliberation. The bill, …
Tobias S. Harris 