Advanced search

Obama vs Okinawa

Practical lessons in world hegemony, as Japan’s attempt to strike an independent course is cut down by the Obama Administration. For the islanders of Okinawa, another chapter in a centuries-old tale of military occupation.

Koizumi’s Coup

How and why Japanese voters rallied to a plebiscite on privatization, downing the first strong cocktail of neoliberalism and chauvinism—laced with submission to the United States—in East Asia. The make-over of the LDP, the eclipse of opposition, and the implications of handing Japan Post to global finance.

Remilitarizing Japan

Relations between Washington and Europe have been under the spotlight since 2001; less so those between the US and Japan. Koizumi’s constitution-breaking dispatch of SDF units to Iraq, and American strategies for containing China and re-arming the East Asian rim.

North Korea in the Vice

Abductions and missiles in Pyongyang; plans and postures of Washington and Tokyo, as the DPRK pursues survival. In Northeast Asia, the prospects for the last front of the Cold War and next battle against the Axis of Evil.

Breaking the Iron Triangle

How close is what was once the strongest—now the weakest—link in the chain of world capital to snapping? Gavan McCormack looks at the mortmain of Japan’s construction state, and the extent of its devastation of the country’s physical environment and public finances alike.

Japan’s Houdini

Gavan McCormack on Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. A pathbreaking study of the life and times of the Showa Emperor, and of his American protectors.

Kim Country: Hard Times in North Korea

“With the Cold War having run its course, the cement in which the Korean ‘problem’ was embedded for nearly half a century cracks and the Cold War supports upon which the system of confrontation rested begin to crumble. Witnesses long intimidated, isolated or silenced by the many walls . . .” read more

The Price of Affluence: The Political Economy of Japanese Leisure

“It is well known that Japan has in the past decade developed into an economic superpower—the world’s greatest asset country, with the biggest per-capita gnp, the biggest aid budgets, home to all ten of the world’s biggest banks and many of its biggest corporations, the base for . . .” read more

Japan and America: Antagonistic Alliance

“The ‘Nixon Shocks’ of 1971, which announced the opening of relations between the us and China and initiated a series of measures to protect the us economy, had an immense combined impact in Japan. As America’s main economic rival, Japan was the most threatened of all . . .” read more

The Student Left in Japan

“The Japanese student movement has won world-wide publicity in recent years for its militancy. Repeated images have been conveyed of helmeted, stave-wielding students doing massive and heroic battle with the police, of their holding out against helicopter-borne assaults on their university strongholds, or of their hi-jacking aircraft at . . .” read more