A candlelight vigil to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre was held outside Shinjuku Station on June 4, 2023, but unlike last year’s event, the lead role in organizing the memorial was taken by young mainland Chinese instead of Hongkongers.
As the trial of sixteen pro-democracy figures began yesterday in Hong Kong, the global human rights group Amnesty International blasted what it called the “politically motivated” charges against the defendants, urging authorities to drop the case.
Lam Wing-Kee, the only one of the Hong Kong Causeway Bay booksellers to remain free, applied for permanent residency in Taiwan last month on the basis of being a professional in arts and culture. While there is a good chance that his application will be accepted, some other Hongkongers are finding greater difficulty.
Kurt Campbell, the Biden administration’s National Security Council Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, is the “brain” behind much of what the Pentagon and US State Department are doing in East Asia today, but his policy approaches do not correspond with the realities of a global US empire now in rapid decline.
The appointment of moderate Yoshimasa Hayashi as Japanese foreign minister has elicited a good deal of discussion in the Chinese news media, with voices on both sides of the Taiwan Strait trying to interpret what it means for the region in an era of heightened tensions.
Japan has a race problem. As I’ve catalogued for a quarter century, there are “Japanese Only” signs and rules on businesses nationwide. Refusing entry and service to all “foreigners” on sight, they exclude people who don’t “look Japanese.”
The 500 Dot Com casino bribery scandal was yet another instance of major corruption that first emerged in the Shinzo Abe era.
As the tumultuous and controversial Tokyo Olympics came to an end, the world set its eyes on Beijing, where the Winter Olympics is to be held in just six months. The 2022 Games could become even more contentious than the event which just closed.
Despite the enormous amount that has been written about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the media coverage of the issue of dumping treated radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean reveals that very little has actually been learned.
This SNA Speakeasy features Brian Hioe on the theme of “Taiwan’s Response to the Hong Kong Crackdown.”
