A Japanese TV show that aired Tuesday advocated imitating Adolf Hitler to become an influential speaker. In a new low, even for Japanese TV, the show, “Kyokasho ni nosetai!” (“Let’s put it on the TEXTBOOK!”), looked at how Hitler “brainwashed the populace,” and how these techniques can be “applied to school and the workplace.” Other […]
Japan has a state-of-the-art forecasting system that predicts the trajectory and magnitude of radiation leaked into the air, but Japan didn’t act on its own information, according to the Associated Press. The forecasting system, SPEEDI, was built in 1986 at a cost of 11 billion yen ($140 million). The system uses weather conditions and the […]
A lot has been said by the major Western news sources (WSJ, Bloomberg, FT, NY Times) about China’s reaction to the downgrade of the U.S. creditworthiness. Although there has been no official comment from Beijing since the downgrade, the Xinhua news agency (the official mouth-piece and the usual government ‘attack dog’ for criticizing the U.S.) […]
Hardly after the 66th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara said Japan should perform simulated nuclear weapons tests to maintain its presence on the world stage. Ishihara said at a press conference that the Obama administration has been conducting subcritical nuclear tests and computer simulations since 2010, even after Obama […]
Santosh Hegde blows the lid on another mega-scandal The latest malefaction to explode in India’s seemingly unending season of scandals concerns the illegal mining and export of iron-ore deposits in the southwestern state of Karnataka. According to an extensive report – some 25,000 pages in length, with the summary running almost 500 – released […]
Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s administration announced Thursday that it would fire three senior policy officials over allegations that the government had grown too friendly with the nuclear power industry. The three officials that the Trade and Industry Minister, Banri Kaieda, canned were Kazuo Matsunaga, Vice Minister for Economy, Trade and Industry; Nobuaki Terasaka, head of […]
There is a common misconception that China is an actual member state of ASEAN. Indeed, China is not one of the ten member states that make up the organization. An interesting fact about this regional institution is that during its earlier years, two of the member states – Indonesia and Vietnam – had their own […]
Today marks the 66th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. At a ceremony held at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park today, Prime Minister Naoto Kan drew parallels between the atomic bombing and the ongoing nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. He took the opportunity to expound on the importance for Japan to […]
“What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.” — John Hersey, Hiroshima Early in the morning of August 6th, 1945 — 66 years ago today — the […]
In a recent piece I authored at Dissent Magazine, I remarked about the ever-expanding income discrepancy between the rich and poor that has come to characterize Thailand as the region’s most evident and relevant example of class warfare. Not only were the results of the recent elections last month a manifestation of a nation-state’s proletariat […]
Two years and one conviction later, Mumbai was once again rocked by three serial bomb blasts last month (apparently to mark the 26/11 convict Ajmal Kasab’s birthday). Though smaller in comparison to the 26/11 terrorists attacks that killed some 166 people during a three day virtual siege on the city, the blasts on 13 July […]
Tochigi became the fourth prefecture to have beef shipments suspended due to fears of radiation contamination. Tochigi joins Fukushima, Iwate and Miyagi to find cattle contaminated with radioactive cesium after eating straw grown near the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. The straw was contaminated with 690,000 becquerels per kilogram, well over the government’s limit of […]
I am going to spare you of my thoughts on the debt ceiling circus in Washington and its foreign policy implications in East Asia. (I’ll leave that to Krugman and Richardson, both of whom I think are spot on). Instead, I’d simply like to direct your attention to a political cartoon I stumbled across recently that […]
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the interesting developments in Thailand’s “deep south,” the site of a long standing Muslim insurgency seeking independence from the government in Bangkok. Soon to be Prime Miniser Yingluck Shinawatra had been stumping in the region in mid-June in an attempt to capture some crucial electoral votes for the […]
Yoshitaka Shindo, right, Tomomi Inada, center, and Masahisa Sato, rear, talk to media at Gimpo Airport in Seoul Monday. Three Japanese lawmakers from the Liberal Democratic Party pushing Tokyo’s claims to the Liancourt Rocks were denied entry to South Korea Monday. The three lawmakers were Yoshiktaka Shindo, the grandson of a general in the Imperial Japanese […]
