Tag: China-Japan

  • Measuring Progress From Wen's Japan Visit

    What’s come out of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s visit in Tokyo? Well, the Associated Press has a quick list. Here are the parts that might actually be news, instead of reiterations of things like agreeing to work for a nuclear weapons-free Korean peninsula: Agreements to work for a successor…

  • A Warning on Yasukuni: Out of Nowhere?

    Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in an interview with Kyodo gave a standard warning against any visit by Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo to the Yasukuni Shrine leading up to Wen’s visit to Tokyo next week. This would not be the least bit surprising, except that Abe hasn’t visited the shrine since taking office. Either Wen…

  • Fukuyama Takes on Japanese Nationalism, His Translator, and the U.S.–Japan Alliance

    Francis Fukuyama, the U.S.-born political scientist who made his name by declaring another discipline, history, to be so over in End of History and the Last Man, does not work much with Japanese issues, despite what some people assume based on his name. But he learned something about establishment Japanese nationalism when he had The…

  • Damned Timezones! I've Been Had

    There is a serious hazard to writing about Asia from the United States. You can get confused about a great many things, not least the date and time. And for the wise American Asia watcher, April Fool’s Day is a two-day holiday, beginning on March 31 when Asian media start pulling our legs. Hachiko has…

  • Shibuya Dog Gone, on His Way to China's Boilers?

    Forgive me for making politics out of the theft of an adored landmark from a place I happen not to adore so much: Shibuya’s Hachiko, the namesake statue of the Tokyo intersection immortalized for a generation of film buffs in Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation.” But this is too much. The other night, some hoodlums…