Notwithstanding the gradually declining fortunes of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan as a journalists’ club (you cannot count on finding a real-life correspondent when you enter its main bar), it still manages to pull off memorable events at which journalists are given the opportunity to engage prominent figures in serious and searching conversation. I participated in one yesterday, at which two recipients of the Japan Prize, David Kuhl & Dennis Meadows, could discuss what they had been doing and thinking. For the radiology pioneer and “father of positron emission tomography scanning” – allowing doctors to look into the physical substance of our brains and other soft tissue – the press could hardly have been expected to express more than awe, but the exchange with Dr. Meadows turned into a probing discussion. Having become famous 37 years ago with his Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth, Meadows has continued to think about what economies are for and what they cannot do. If the format of the event and time had permitted it, this FCCJ press luncheon could easily have turned into a brainstorming session about the broader background against which the current financial crisis could profitably be viewed,...

...well as still serving, have added their testimony to that conclusion. But it will not be touched. It is sacrosanct, and thereby lifted above political control. It serves a higher aim, one that needs no further re-examination as far as the mindset that comes with it is concerned. Hence it is literally out of control. But today, ten years after the onset of the ‘war on terror’, this out-of-control militarism cannot be understood with analogies from America’s past; the list of countries invaded, the overthrown governments or the inevitable Vietnam comparison. Equating these with what the United States does today diminishes its horror and undermines a fledgling anti-war movement. I covered the Vietnam war as a reporter in several of its phases, and for all its gruesomeness and warcrimes, I do not believe it can properly be seen as a prelude to America’s current military activities. It began as part of a general containment policy against the Soviet Union. It was justified with lies, yes, but it was fought to stop the conquest of a relatively free Southeast Asian country by a northern neighbor under communist dictatorship linked to Moscow. The South Vietnamese, ethnically only partially related to the Northerners,...

...even if nothing more happens than the re-emergence of the situation in prewar Japan, when two politically almost identical parties, the Seiyukai and the Minseito, used to take turns in forming the government, Japan would get the benefit of “new brooms” that sweep clean. With those brooms, obstacles to what should be done, in the form of entrenched relationships, can be cleared away. It already experienced a bit of this in 1993, when the LDP was shortly out of power, and when I noticed the new broom effect even in the prefectures. But one may already expect more. The Minshuto welcomes anyone in the media to its press conferences; doing away with the traditional cartel-like newsgathering practices through “press clubs” closed to outsiders, notorious for their frequent self-censorship. If Minshuto ministers will follow this example, as seems likely, political reporting is bound to change in Japan, and with that probably also the manufacturing of official political reality. It could make a huge difference. Along with breaking the LDP hold on what is formally the government, and the possibility of the introduction of real government, it makes the coming elections the most important Japanese political event in at least sixteen years....

...sensitive memories will say no. Who could disagree with the observation that we live in a world less promising, less secure, less hopeful and with more uncertainty, than the world was in the final decade of the twentieth century? Democracy was going to be the wave of the future. But the notion of a properly represented citizenry has become so pale in the putative democracies that it is almost non-existent among the generation now coming of age politically. The notion of a “peace dividend” became a popular political slogan with which especially the then American president and British prime minister speculated about new economic benefits of money left over from reduced defense budgets. Instead we now see a metastasizing American military-industrial complex, which gained an extra “security” component with a dramatic rise in civil surveillance. There is greater job uncertainty in the countries that once comprised the Cold-War Atlantic Alliance, and in several we may note a considerable shrinking of the middle class. Then there have been the two wars against Islamic countries, and their continued occupation by “coalitions” of countries that after World War II denounced the very idea of new foreign occupations, but now engage in large-scale state-condoned...

On Japanese Scandals (PDF version) Karel van Wolferen / Chuo Koron Sept. 1991 The study of Japanese political and economic affairs should be enriched with a special subcategory for scandals. Not because Japanese people produce more, or juicier, scandals than others. Some other countries are pretty good at it as well. But there is a need for systematic analysis of Japanese scandals because of their important function of keeping the Japanese power system running smoothly. The current security brokerage scandal is, again, a wonderful example of this. The major, central, role of the Japanese scandal is to help curb excess. Excess in any kind of behaviour that is otherwise considered normal. For example, it is considered normal in Japan that the astronomical amounts of money politicians spend to get re-elected is provided by corporations. But there are limits to this normality. It is not considered a good thing that one politician gets ten times more than he needs to get re-elected. Conversely, it is not considered a good thing that one single company funds every well-known politician. In either case there is the risk of producing a threat to the way things are done. This threat may turn into an...

...domination is not feasible, and hence cannot be a serious long term goal. What used to be called the ‘free world’ shows as yet no signs of grasping the obvious fact that a common cause that held it together before the demise of the Soviet Union has vanished. Unending wars do not belong to the aims endorsed by the member states of the European Union, or Japan. So, the fundamental condition of any alliance — shared political purpose — does not obtain. Daily news about Egyptians and Lybians wrestling to free themselves from tyrannical regimes keeps alive imagery of Western values, and of a laudable effort to help along the democracy sought by others. What used to be called the ‘free world’ has not yet awakened to the reality that, with all its professed intention of spreading democracy and the rule of law over the world, the United States itself no longer has the functioning institutional underpinnings to be a democracy on the national level. Or, for that matter, that its legal system does not do the most important thing it is meant to accomplish: to protect common citizens against the rapacity, political priorities and caprices of powerful entities, which...