Following the Fallout from Fukushima
What the hell was anybody doing building six nuclear power plants in an earthquake-prone zone?” Senator John Kerry asked during a speech the other day at the Commonwealth Club of California. “I don’t get it. It’s hubris, if not stupidity.”…
Japan’s Economy Will Recover Quickly and Grow Fast
While we continue to grieve for the victims of the Japanese earthquake and its aftermath, it is perhaps time to cast a colder eye on the consequences of the country’s worst disaster since the atomic attacks of 1945. What is…
Japan: The Meltdown of Growth-At-Any-Cost
Long before the worst earthquake in Japan’s history produced the worst nuclearaccident in Japan’s history, nuclear power had acquired a menacing reputation among many Japanese. If the crisis in triplicate at the Fukushima power plant (where four nuclear reactors are…
JAPAN: AN INTERPRETATION
THE DONALD RICHIE READER: 50 Years of Writing on Japan. By Donald Richie. Compiled and edited by Arturo Silva. Stone Bridge. 238 pp. $29.95 with case. Paper $19.95. Those inscrutable Japanese. They’ve inspired more trash between hard covers over the…
Harnessing the Rising Sun
EMBRACING DEFEAT: Japan in the Wake of World War II. By John W. Dower. Norton/New Press. 676 pp. $29.95. TOKYO UNDERWORLD: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan. By Robert Whiting. Pantheon. 372 pp. $27.50….
Japan: The enigma of American power
“The Japanese can neither love the Americans nor endure being loved by them.” —Ambassador Sir Oliver Morland to the British Foreign Office, 1963(1) The air station at Kadena is not merely the largest of the 39 U.S. military bases in…
Remembering Japan: A bilateral history
“But the essence of a nation is that all the individuals share a great many things in common, and also that they have forgotten some things.” —Ernest Renan, What is a Nation?, 1881 A little more than a year ago,…
The Closed Shop
The article comments on legal procedures of Japan. In 1997 Japan’s Supreme Court handed down a startling decision after more than three decades of legal warfare over the Education Ministry’s censors. Japan has an independent judiciary in name only– one…
Recent Comments