Shigeru Yoshida’s second premiership from 1948-1954 was one of the most transformative in Japanese history, taking the nation from its progressive, unstable early postwar era into a long period of entrenched conservative rule, ostensibly exercising independence but in reality functioning as a client state absorbed into the informal American empire.
What Fujimori did with power became a cautionary tale—of how an outsider, once let in, can corrupt everything.
An interview with Jon Heese, a naturalized Canadian-Japanese and elected Tsukuba City Councillor of twelve years. A Caucasian Visible Minority of Japan, Heese has long been advocating that other Non-Japanese Residents naturalize and run for office.
China announced a series of new import bans on Taiwanese products late last week, primarily seafood and beverages, in what appears to be the mainland’s latest effort at applying economic pressure.
Ahead of Donald Trump’s second visit to Japan in 2019, a Japanese hotelier invited the US president’s former chief strategist and senior advisor Steve Bannon to give a “special lecture” in Tokyo. That hotelier’s name is Toshio Motoya.
Lawmakers in Argentina have approved a new one-time levy on the country’s richest citizens to raise money to address the devastating health and economic consequences of the ongoing coronavirus crisis.
Activists have long called attention to the abusive working conditions that fishermen from Southeast Asia are subjected to aboard Taiwanese-owned fishing boats. Their campaign to improve life for the migrant workers has been boosted by recent moves by the United States to classify fish from Taiwan as a product of forced labor.
Eric Blanc of Jacobin magazine fears a US corporate Democrat repeat of the 2000 elections when Al Gore refused to fight once the Supreme Court gave the election to George W. Bush.
These are sobering times for Japan fans. Thanks to the pandemic, even the most starry-eyed and enfranchised foreigners are having their bubbles burst, realizing that their status in Japan, no matter how hard-earned, matters not one whit to Japan’s policymakers.
In a shocking series of exposés at the beginning of this month, the Mainichi Shinbun reported that minority children of workers in Japanese schools were being segregated from their Japanese peers, put in classes for the mentally disabled, and systematically denied an education.
