What do the editors of the Washington Post think they are doing with their once venerable paper? Assisting Washington’s authorities in their various projects or – what they want their readers to believe – informing the citizenry with as truthful a picture as they can put together of world events? It is a proper question to ask after the editorial published the day before yesterday linking a prominent Japanese politician with the “lunatic fringe” for his questioning of some aspects of the official version of what happened on the 11th of September 2001. In a casual chat with an editor, after an interview about Japan’s immigration policies, Yukihisa Fujita (member of the Japanese Upper House and Director General of the International Bureau of the DPJ, the new party in power) made some remarks that could have been made in a private capacity by thousands of people with political acumen about misgivings that one must suppose are shared by quite a few members of the Post’s staff, if that paper still hires people with journalistic gifts and instincts.
     There are two stories here. One is a seeming attempt to add yet another bit of evidence that the new party that last September broke a half century of power monopoly is not fit to govern America’s most important ally in Asia. After it does its character assassination, the editorial notes that Fujita’s “views, rooted as they are in profound distrust of the United States, seem to reflect a strain of anti-American thought that runs through the DPJ and the government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama…

     One of the best things that has happened since Barack Obama took over from George W. Bush is that ‘the most powerful man in the world’ no longer sounds like he is speaking to 11 year olds. Obama’s oratory has been not only a great asset for himself – it elevated him to where he is – but also a pleasure to listen to, even though in the past eleven months it has largely been used to substitute for the concrete measures he had promised his supporters. But with his latest performance, his hooray-for-war speech of a week ago, he has much insulted the intelligence of his supporters, of Americans in general, and of all of us, concerned onlookers around the world. Quite a lot of what he said did not begin to be convincing in any way, and it all pivoted around this line: “If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people was at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow.”
     Now, to find examples of a politician speaking the unvarnished truth while in some way involved in war we would have to dig very, very deep in the collective memory of all nations, and do this probably in vain. But in this case, Obama’s national security advisor, General James Jones, has himself said that “The Al Qaeda presence [in Afghanistan] is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.” Obama of course conflates Al Qaeda with the Taliban (who have done no Americans any harm, except those occupying their territory), as has become customary in many circles, but can he possibly believe that they form a threat worth staving off with a trillion or so dollars, perhaps thousands of new American deaths, and many times more former soldiers without limbs or half their brains, and, not to forget, record numbers of future suicides among the very same cadets before whom he chose to speak; quite aside from the tens of thousands of dead Afghans.
     He may have been insufficiently prepared for the presidency, but he cannot be that naive.

A Tale of Two Countries – Obama’s Failure and Minshuto’s Success
(I gave this talk yesterday before the Ozaki Foundation in Tokyo)

     You perhaps think the subtitle of this talk – Obama’s Failure, Minshuto’s Success – to be a mischievous and overly hasty conclusion. But I think it is already a reality staring us in the face. Summing it up right away: Obama has missed the one rare opportunity for initiating the momentous reform policies he was expected to deliver, and such opportunity will not come again. The Minshuto, on the other hand, has moved fast to change Japan’s political reality beyond a point where it can revert to where things were until September, and where they had been for decades of indecision.
     Both the United States and Japan are in the middle of developments that are bound to have a great effect on the wider world, quite aside from them changing their domestic circumstances. I can imagine that you have greater trouble believing that about Japan than about the United States, but that may be because of an ingrained habit, widespread in the world, of identifying the United States with leadership and vigor and Japan as a place where the politics never change.
     What the two countries have had in common are serious problems connected with a lack of effective political control. This out-of-control situation has in the United States led to regression; to things moving in very much the wrong way, especially with regards to its financial system and its waging unprovoked and unnecessary wars. And in Japan the out-of-control situation has led to stagnation, to things not moving at all, except, very gradually downhill, socially and economically. No wonder therefore that expectations before the American and Japanese elections were considerably greater than they tend to be with run-of-the-mill elections among the world’s democracies.

     see also a new Sampiemon columnn about NATO in Afghanistan

What I hoped to read has finally been written: A plea from an American addressed to all Europeans for help with bringing the United States to its senses. It ought to be on the editorial pages of every serious newspaper in Europe. In a speech contributed to the Mut zur Ethik Conference held in Austria a couple of weeks ago, Paul Craig Roberts lays out the case for Europe to “go into active opposition to US foreign policy.” American freedom as well as “sovereign independence elsewhere in the world” require this. Both the political leaders and the people of the United States “need Europe’s help in order to avoid the degeneration of the American political entity.”
     Europeans insufficiently clued in about the gyrations of American non-mainstream media discussion might imagine such exhortation as coming from rather far-off leftist quarters. But Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President Reagan, Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, and has held numerous academic appointments in what in the US are categorized as ‘conservative’ institutions. I first came across his writing on a well-known ‘conservative’ website. He disappeared from that ever rightward drifting site when he became one of the first authors from a non-leftist background to pierce through the political exploitation of the September 11 attacks. And pierce he did, deeper and more to the point than many on that threadbare left side of the American political spectrum. Articulate, erudite, and informed by historical perspective, Roberts has been one of my anchors on the internet, a reassurance that it was not me who had gone mad, while what I call the insanity factor

      The significance of yesterday's Japanese election results goes beyond a relatively new and untried political party ending half a century of rule by a competing party; if the new leaders turn out to be true leaders and are allowed to carry out their declared intentions, this will fundamentally change the Japanese power system. That power system has in modern times always been averse to genuine political leadership. It has been relatively good at administrative governance, with career officials maintaining policy stability and initiating adjustments to stick to a course set by accident or imagined national expediency before their time.       

     This means that with few exceptions the elected officials – politicians in Japan's parliament, in the Prime Minister's office, and ostensibly as heads of government agencies – besides reassuring their own citizens and the outside world that Japan is a democracy, have played a mostly marginal role, as powerbrokers at best. We can actually single out an architect who set it up this way just before the turn of the century before last: Yamagata Aritomo. Rather than here telling the story of this remarkable man, who created Japan's modern bureaucracy along with its early 20th-century military establishment, I will copy an essay about him that I wrote in 2001 in a sub-jotting hereunder. What Japan’s new government will be up against is essentially what he wrought and, in a modified way, has endured for over a century.
     To say that the task that Hatoyama Yukio and his fellow leaders of the Minshuto have set themselves is daunting would be putting it very, very mildly.

     What better opportunity than the election of aspirant supervisors of Japanese bureaucratic power to bring to the attention of the world a neglected Japanese figure who established that power and ought to be remembered, along with Bismarck, Lenin, Mao, and the two Roosevelts, as one of the creators of twentieth century political reality.

Written in June 2001 (pdf of original essay):
     His name, Yamagata Aritomo, may only register with those who have read Japanese history. Even in Japanese minds he may not be more than a shadow, dwarfed by Ito Hirobumi among the Meiji Period architects of Japanese modernization. But he deserves to be known as the creator of what in essence has remained Japan's political system. In the end, what the world has been learning to think of as Japan's lack of political will, should be blamed on Yamagata. His legacy endures in a more immediate sense today than, say, Bismarck's legacy does in Germany.

     The most noteworthy thing that Barack Obama has done since he became president is to put his stamp of approval on policies that at the end of the presidency of George W. Bush were considered unacceptable by a majority of the American public (and which appalled much of the world). He has thereby joined the large number of his fellow Democratic Party members who, dependent as they are on support from special interest groups, had countersigned them long ago. I am referring to the two things in particular that have gone disastrously wrong, and which Obama had been expected by his activist supporters to try to reverse: American belligerency and the unaccountable power of the crisis-creating apparatus of financial institutions. While after the November election these most undesirable aspects of American participation in the world appeared ready for repair, the trends that made them what they are have now become irreversible. Europeans and Asians ought to take note. Latin Americans have already done so. It is the most significant thing we have learned this past half year in the context of all our future.
     The “give him time!” response from a multitude of those who had faith in Obama has proved to be very damaging, as it throttled

see also the new Sampiemon column on Obama in Moscow

     Much progressive political energy is lost as it is channelled toward narrowly conceived causes, where it may do some good but where much of it is wasted. This was an overwhelming impression I had when attending the Tallberg forum in Sweden the week before last. It was, to be sure, a wonderful occasion to meet some of the roughly 400 people who had come from literally all corners of the world and who – certainly the ones I met – clearly had their hearts in the right place. I do not want to detract from their seriousness and hard work as they try to help alleviate dire conditions of poverty, ecological crisis, and other fairly concrete ills of the world in connection to which human action might make a difference. But would their causes not be better served if at least some of this energy was channelled into efforts to revive countervailing power against the forces that cause the problems of their concern to begin with?
     One of the biggest central notions of the forum is ‘sustainable development’. When listening to the earnest accounts presented at one of the preliminary sessions I suddenly felt a compulsion to comment on it all as an outsider, thinking myself to be eminently qualified by the fact that the term sustainable development had, until then, giving me the jitters. Practically all attention has gone to sustainable methods, while the very things to be developed tend to get a cursory glance and appear to be mostly taken for granted.

     The forced resignation of the leader of Japan's opposition party, Ichiro Ozawa, and the election of Yukio Hatoyama as his succcessor, may appear to outsiders as the proverbial storm in a teacup, but it is more than that: it is directly related to the question whether or not Japan's curse of ‘muddling through’ will be lifted after the forthcoming elections. Especially now that it has been demonstrated, once again, that the immune system of Japan's political world is still capable of keeping down those who might upset the status quo.
     The status quo is treasured by Japan's administrative bureaucracy, of which the editors of the big newspapers, the managers of the industrial federations, as well as those of the financial institutions and much of big industry also form a part. The absence of waves is a sacred condition. It prevents what is known here as "a confused situation" – disturbance of the social order that the administrators fear most. The Japanese public as a whole is less addicted to the status quo. And when I came back to Japan in the beginning of this year my first conversations

     Give the man time! A new head of government cannot do everything at once! He has only had three months. These are the responses that one is likely to get when expressing doubts about the effectiveness of Obama's policies when measured against the high expectations and overwhelming feelings of urgency that something dramatic should be done. Impatience is frequently interpreted as following from insufficient understanding about the set of circumstances that this new president inherited, circumstances that could hardly be worse in the imagination of most sympathisers. What Obama has been expected to do comes down to a task for which daunting is too weak an adjective, one requiring herculean powers. And of course that takes time. All true. But by not being critical, by not scrutinising his early decisions about the people with whom he wants to work, by not strongly questioning how these people interpret the jobs they have been asked to do; by not being critical of Obama in his early days, we may unwittingly be adding to the many disadvantages that surround him.
     When in political life something very big must be undertaken, the question of competence on the part of those who undertake it gains supreme importance.

     The prevailing intellectual climate is not friendly to the notion that much of the time we do not know what we are doing, in the sense of producing results that diverge widely from what in all sanity we would have wanted to produce. Intellectually we have come a far way from remote ancestors who thought they could make sense of their reality by invoking "fate" or capricious gods who derived pleasure from playing with humanity. Enlightened thought has us acting as conscious agents.
     All varieties of liberalism – not the "leftism" of American political understanding, but the legacy of Locke, Hume, and John Stuart Mill – hold high the concepts of "agency" and "choice". Especially in the United States these are taken for granted. American social science is steeped in them. Political thought on the most popular level treats them as given. The way in which our society is put together and how it works is the outcome of collective choice, our lives are lived as directed by conscious human agency; the one assumption contains, of course, the other.

     There could hardly be a greater difference between the United States and Japan than when their heads of government change. The American president decapitates, as it were, the government entities staffed by career officials and brings in a double layer of new appointees who, he hopes, will do his bidding. The new Japanese prime minister must be painstakingly heedful of balancing factional interests of the ruling party as he selects members of a cabinet, and those newly chosen top politicians are subsequently treated as temporary visitors in the ministries they ostensibly head. If these Japanese politicians are lucky, and survive more than one of the regular cabinet reshuffles, the top bureaucrats who work theoretically underneath them may perhaps help realize a small pet project that will be associated with their name. In the context of the ubiquitous thorny question of how much politicians should listen to bureaucrats or bureaucrats should be guided by elected representatives, the balance between the two has in both countries swung to extreme and opposite ends.
     But Japan and the United States have still something in common. Something that has suddenly become highly relevant in the United States. Among American government entities, there are a couple of exceptions to the norm of presidential supervision.

     Notwithstanding the gradually declining fortunes of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan as a journalists’ club (you cannot count on finding a real-life correspondent when you enter its main bar), it still manages to pull off memorable events at which journalists are given the opportunity to engage prominent figures in serious and searching conversation. I participated in one yesterday, at which two recipients of the Japan Prize, David Kuhl & Dennis Meadows, could discuss what they had been doing and thinking. For the radiology pioneer and “father of positron emission tomography scanning" – allowing doctors to look into the physical substance of our brains and other soft tissue – the press could hardly have been expected to express more than awe, but the exchange with Dr. Meadows turned into a probing discussion.
      Having become famous 37 years ago with his Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth, Meadows has continued to think about what economies are for and what they cannot do. If the format of the event and time had permitted it, this FCCJ press luncheon could easily have turned into a brainstorming session

and a related new column by Jan Sampiemon

     Outsize controversies attending two much awaited top political meetings held this week – the G20 and NATO – should awaken the world to the fact that the various crises confronting us can also be seen as being linked to a huge conceptual crisis. Being discussed are the two areas of activity that will probably more than anything else decide the medium-term future of the world: the collapse of part of the global financial system and American foreign policy. The latter has been made almost invisible in the news by the former, but continues to be a weighty factor. The shallowness of the talk reaching us from these meetings should worry us. Lack of political will is of course one reason for it, but another one, directly related to that, is the huge conceptual crisis.
     Conceptual crises may follow from intellectual sloppiness, a dearth of imagination and other symptoms of idle brains. But I think more important in this case is a loss of knowledge that cripples otherwise very active brains. The loss of knowledge in the past few decades has been horrendous.

     As evidence continues to pile up about the damage done to national economies and the international financial system through policies inspired by ideological excess, the European Union is beginning to loom large as yet another victim of the same thing. The ample evidence of its being in trouble may not as yet have prompted the mainstream commentariat to see the connection, but it is there even so.
     In short: the neoliberal legacy, sometimes known as market fundamentalism or market worship, has been the major hurdle that halted an earlier gradual process of integration. It mostly blinded

     In these days of multiple crises ingrained assumptions loom large as obstacles to be overcome. This goes for international relations as much as for the tottering financial system that has been absorbing most political attention in recent months. I just stumbled upon a number of interrelated misguided and, in mainstream discussion, rarely examined assumptions on my laptop. They appeared in an article published a year ago by John Ikenberry in Foreign Affairs entitled: The Rise of China and the Future of the West – can the Liberal System Survive? A quite appropriate read on my one but last day in Beijing, after having had an opportunity to look at Chinese life up close here and in Kunming and other places in Yunnan (a spectacularly beautiful province, by the way).
     Now, I like to read Ikenberry. I think that in earlier writing he has made important points

     Martin Wolf writing in the Financial Times asked a couple of days ago whether Barack Obama’s presidency has already failed. He concedes that in normal times, such a question would be ludicrous. But by now most politically thoughtful people have concluded that these are times, as Wolf puts it, “of great danger”. “Today, the new US administration can disown responsibility for its inheritance; tomorrow, it will own it. Today, it can offer solutions; tomorrow it will have become the problem. Today, it is in control of events; tomorrow, events will take control of it.” Wolf,

     The credit crisis and what follows, dominating economic discussions for some five months now, have prompted such a variety of explanations of causes and remedies, that I keep thinking of the famous Hindu and Indian Buddhist parable of the six blind men and the elephant. One feels a leg, another the trunk, and yet another its tail, and they all come with stories challenging each other’s truth. It would be hard to find a better recent instance of what the fable depicts. I have just re-read some contrasting explanations: from Clintonian regulations perverting private incentives, to Greenspan’s supporting the kind of activity and deregulation schemes that eventually made the crisis possible. Too much regulation, too much de-regulation

     New crises inevitably dim older ones. Bits of the past that a nation was half-digesting intellectually may then remain undigested for a long time, perhaps forever. The current financial crisis has pushed the moral crises caused by warcrimes committed by a part of what since World War II proudly called itself “the free world” well down the memory holes in several countries.
     We should remember that the state of things resulting directly from the American government’s response to the terrorist attacks of the 11th of September 2001, led to lingering moral and intellectual crises on both sides of the Atlantic.

     I just heard that Newsweek will no longer have a bureau with correspondents in Tokyo, and that the Los Angeles Times has begun to cover Japan out of Seoul, Korea. When the Newsweek bureau chief goes, Tokyo loses one of its most thoughtful foreign correspondents. These are merely the latest developments in the gradual marginalization of Japan as a source of news and stories about how things might be done differently in different civilizations; in other words: of Japan as a source of knowledge. TV, the main source of information for the vast majority in most places, lost interest in Japan some years ago. It illustrates the unfortunate fact that our sources of knowledge and the way we go about gathering this knowledge are quite heavily dependent on fashion.
     Not so long ago it was believed that if you wanted to know our contemporary world you could not do without knowledge of Japan, especially

and a new Sampiemon column.

     Who in his or her right mind does not want to help Barack Obama succeed as President of the United States? Almost everyone in Europe hopes he does, so is the overwhelming general impression. And Europeans should help him, so write a number of American commentators. They should end their unwillingness to cooperate with Washington. What that means for the liberal hawks, over-represented among them, was conveyed by a Thomas Friedman column shortly after the election. This correspondent

     One of the things to which this website hopes to contribute is an active European public sphere. I hope that others with an interest in political, economic, and social affairs, who lament the shortcomings of European media in providing a pan-European citizen forum, will want to do the same, so that we may establish new networks for relevant conversation. 
     Too few European voices with something to say reach other Europeans even one border away. A collectivity of those could do much to offset the odd and undesirable fact that most of the world and much of Europe consumes “news” in the choices and  sauces and in portions determined by American-British editors. While some of these editors are without question excellent, they themselves can benefit from choices and interpretations arrived at by journalists and essayists from outside the territories in which that wonderful language, which most of us use when meeting foreign friends, is the tool of daily conversation.
One of those writers is Jan Sampiemon whose insights

or ingredients for a twentyfirst century Shakespeare 2

     This evening I will be joining three close friends who happen to be American to celebrate, in the words of one of them, the departure of the worst president ever. All my other American friends think of him the same way, although force of journalistic hedging habit prompts some to insert “one of” before “the worst”. And then, if my Tokyo friends have managed to stay awake – we are running 14 hours ahead of Washington – their attention will turn to the pomp and circumstance taking place over there. What they will see, as must occur to everyone else in the world watching the inauguration, is rather unlike the manner in which elected heads of government, as distinct from royal successors, take over in other countries.

     As the Bush years are now one day away from finally drawing to a close, what occurs to me is how much is lost in writing from hindsight. Sure, the gains that come with it are not open to dispute: often a better perspective as earlier unknown elements of the story fall into place, or revelations emerge that give it a dramatic twist. But there is something about the immediate experience of an event that, when conveyed with an effort, may contain knowledge about it that will be very difficult to recapture at a later stage. Which is why historians like diaries. Some knowledge just simply disappears. George Orwell

     “When it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed [to] looking at what we got wrong in the past”, so said president elect Barack Obama when commenting on possible investigations of wrongdoing by the CIA and other American government agencies. I read this in the train to Tokyo (having just arrived from Shanghai) in the Daily Yomiuri. That paper, despite erratic editorial ups-and-downs,

     One of the cardinal differences between the United States and most of Europe is rarely discussed. It concerns the political comfort that is derived from having enemies. Americans are not likely to discuss this because of a widespread assumption that they actually have genuinely threatening enemies. Europeans have, on the whole, not paid attention to the subject since most of them take it more or less for granted that not having enemies is preferable to having them, and assume that Americans can hardly disagree

     Respected media wish to be responsible, and journalists want to be credible. Both adjectives, as understood by a broad audience, have undergone an Orwellian metamorphosis. Media can only be responsible if they hire credible reporters. But something monstrous has happened to the notion of credibility in recent years. It is no longer measured by the degree to which statements correspond to observable reality. In fact, assessments arrived at logically from available information and one's understanding of the world could be ruinous for one's credibility

     There exist social, economic, demographic, psychological and sundry other "forces of history", but there are also individuals who, at a certain moment, can make all the difference. It so happened that at the end of the year 2000, the American Supreme Court appointed to the presidency a person who had not won it through the preceding election and who, fundamentally incurious and clueless as to the meaning of government, lacked the personal qualities necessary to function as more than a figurehead. Tragically,

     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

     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

     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