Appreciations

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Stephen Harner is a former U.S. diplomat, Japan-based business executive turned China-based business executive and now a Japan-based consultant. He blogs for Forbes Magazine at http://blogs.forbes.com/stephenharner/ (the link in the blogroll is Whither Japan).

For outstanding -- and I mean eye-wateringly good -- analyses of Japan issues for free, one cannot do better than the researchers at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) in New Dehli. Their "Comments" are works of outstanding scholarship. The latest one on Japan, "Political Rift Deepens in Japan over Senkakus’ Nationalization," is available here.

Note that all the references within the comment are to articles the domestic press; none from non-Japanese sources. Nobody else does that, not even the truly excellent folks at the Congressional Reference Service (CRS) -- who, to be fair, have to answer to U.S. congressmen and their staffs who may have read something in the New York Times or Stars and Stripes.

And now, a bleg. Will the graduate student who is blogging his readings of the Big Books on Japan with the word "Heian" in the title line of his blog please contact me, so I can add your blog's name to the blogroll?

For Those Who Don't Have The Time

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, To dig or an awareness of just how much is being made available on-line regarding Japan's security environment, the latest edition of Tiago Mauricio's East Asian Security & Defence Digest is out. (Link)

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!