The April 26 acquittal of Japan’s most important politician on charges connected with delayed reporting of a financial transfer is greatly significant for Japan and possibly its neighbors as well. Ichiro Ozawa has for almost two decades been considered as the one Japanese politician with the organizational skills; the understanding of the career officials who in practice run the country; the political network building capacity and, above all, a thorough grasp of what causes the notorious weakness at the center, to have the best chance of reforming the governing system in line with what the electorate and political specialists outside the realms of vested interests have long believed to be desirable. In 1993 he gave the crucial start signal for the reformist movement by leaving the LDP, which had been the mainstay of Japan’s de-facto one-party system since 1955, and which ruled in name only, leaving actual policy making in the hands of a dominant (and uncommonly skillfull) group of administrators within the bureaucracy. He had laid down his credo in a book advocating for Japan to become “a normal country” (with a center of political accountability), and eventually brought the various groups of reformist minded politicians together in the...

On the surface the story is simple enough. Japan’s most important/powerful/controversial politician has done it again: shaking up the party political world by leaving, and perhaps breaking up, the DPJ, Japan’s ruling party. And that because things did not go his way. The Japanese media were, predictably, ready with their favorite epithet, ‘the destroyer’, and with quotes from political commentators that this time his star may be truly fading because the perennial polls show that the people have had it with him. Almost all foreign reporting trying to make sense of his latest turbulence in Japanese politics meekly follows the lead of the big national newspapers, as it has done for the last couple of decades (note that the number of regular full-time correspondents in Tokyo has dwindled to a small fraction of what it used to be). The financially oriented foreign reporting quotes resident analysts praising the leadership qualities of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, whose insistence that a law aimed at doubling the consumption tax must be pushed through Parliament triggered Ozawa’s move. Added comment holds that the Prime Minister is better off without the recalcitrant Ozawa in his party since this makes it easier to push through a...

We should face it: There exists an America Problem. Many Americans have gradually come to that conclusion in the past eight years. Elsewhere in the world, politically attentive people have become aware of it in degrees. But in Europe hesitations born of wishful thinking and fear of the unfamiliar, as well as fear for negative domestic response, have meant that few people come out and say so openly. The America Problem has had some time to develop, but it came into full view for those who cared to notice on the 1st of June in 2002 when the man who by common cliche is known as the most powerful man in the world announced a radical change to his position within it. This drained the meaning from the idea of “The West”. His changed objectives made a peacetime alliance with the United States impossible in all but name. Very few in Europe or elsewhere were prepared for this. In one fell swoop the president of the United States dumped the America Problem in the world’s lap by declaring that he has the right to attack any country that he chooses to name as an enemy. No UN Charter, no treaty,...

Where does the news about world affairs come from? This would seem a important question, but it is rarely asked and inaccurate ideas about it appear to be taken for granted in Europe as well as parts of Asia with which I am familiar. A crucially relevant fact in the backgroud of a lot of what I hope to put on this site is that there are few independent European and Asian purveyors of world news, and that in the selection of what is supposedly worth knowing among the myriad happenings on our planet their influence is virtually nil. The first draft of history, as seen by most of the world, goes through an American filter, because what we get to know about events beyond national borders reaches us mainly through American mediaries, with some help from the British. Some things like big earthquakes, major train crashes and the like do not require superior skills of judgment for inclusion among the dozen or so “stories” served up every day, but for political and economic developments the skills and preoccupations of those who do the judging is clear. The more complex the matter, the more important the appraisers. European audiences may...

I want to start this website on what I believe to be a noncontroversial premise: that to deal with the world effectively we first must understand it. Who could disagree with the assertion that knowledge is needed for effectiveness? But then who could deny another, urgent, conclusion, that there is reason for alarm, because our means for seeing things clearly in a world more confusing than it was decades ago have diminished, vanished or become corrupted. That last line almost inevitably gains a controversial edge because this dire situation has not been much commented upon. It has crept up on us. It has much worsened after the Cold War disappeared, and is closely connected with political-economic changes that followed its end. But this plight of warped knowledge is suddenly made concrete when you bring to mind the anticipation of things to come when the Cold War ended and realize how far removed our current situation is from that expected future. Does the reality of the world today resemble what was expected from it, around twenty years ago, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist? I imagine that visitors to this new site who have lived a bit and have politically...

Authors wish to reach an audience, the larger the better. I am no exception. I think and write about political and economic subjects, about history and social institutions, with the aim of discovering unexpected connections. But because a large amount of what I have written was in books and articles aimed at a Japanese audience (having lived for most of my life in East Asia), this remained hidden from most of you. From the turn of the century onward I have written a lot about what was happening in the world’s most powerful country and what that might mean for the rest of us. But much of that remained hidden as well through vagaries of the publishing trade.There are things I have thought about that may interest you. I hope that you will find some of my hobby-horses worth your time as well. I am intrigued by the phenomenon of power and how that is exercised and experienced in different political cultures. I am interested in what actively limits our gaining knowledge on important matters, on the widespread phenomenon of studied ignorance, and particularly on the ways that all this shapes our political environment. I will try to comment regularly...