Worth One's Time #1

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Since the Facebook page of the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies (ICAS) at Temple University, Japan tells the visitor absolutely nothing about upcoming events, I will step in and reprint the announcement of an must-see presentation:

'Battle stations?' Sea Power and Sino-Japanese Security Relations in the East China Sea
Date: Thursday, September 13, 2012
Time: 7:00p.m. (Talk will start at 7:30p.m.)
Venue:
Temple University, Japan Campus, Mita 5F
(access: http://www.tuj.ac.jp/maps/tokyo.html)
Speaker:
Alessio Patalano
Moderator:
Robert Dujarric
Admission: Free (Open to general public)
Language: English
RSVP:
icas@tuj.temple.edu
*If you RSVP you are automatically registered. If possible, we ask you to RSVP but we always welcome participants even you do not RSVP.
*RSVPなしでも参加できますので、直接会場へお越しください。

Dr. Patalano knows more about Japan's maritime power than anyone else, at least among those publishing works for the general reader. Where others speak of generalities, he speaks in specifics and whether others speak of elements deracinated from time, he embeds everything in the now.

Now ICAS, fix your darn Facebook page!

Tien An Men...Or Should I Say "Ten An Mon?"

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Retired officials and think tankers...they really are not just allowed to have their own opinions...but their own facts.

What Roosevelt would do in the South China Sea
The Financial Times

James Clad and Robert Manning

Planting flags on islets, declaring cities where there are too few residents to fill a restaurant, and huffing and puffing over uninhabited rocks are acts more suited to a Gilbert and Sullivan farce than to nations in the 21st century.

Absurdities aside, the tensions in the South China Sea could shape the balance of power in Asia and put at risk the $18tn east Asian economy. However, a century-old diplomatic idea used by a former US president offers a solution to the crisis.

[snip]

To find something new, we might try looking backwards - to a type of split-the-difference US diplomacy last deployed after Russia and Japan had fought a war in 1905. The next year, Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace that lasted three decades, allowing China, Europe and the US to adjust to Japan's rise as a major power.

(Link)

Mr. Clad and Mr. Manning, please elaborate, in written form, precisely which three decades of peace, starting when and ending when, you are talking about. Please send the results to the following addresses (since these are local addresses, you will be saving on postage):

2450 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20008

and

3505 International Place NW
Washington, DC 20008

I am sure the recipients will be surprised...though I cannot guarantee it will be pleasantly so.

The Great Peace of Portsmouth: we all remember it so well.

Redefining Normal For Japan

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Thwack!

That is the sound that this essay by Soeya Yoshihide, Director of Keio University's Institute of East Asian Studies, makes. It delivers a punishing blow to the arguments of a raft of U.S. and U.K. monographs and op-eds published over the last two decades on the significance of Japan's normalization in military affairs.

Given the number of targets it hits, it is the whack-a-mole of blog posts.

Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!