...get a point across, a point deserving at least 500 words, which his or her editor refuses to understand. The marginalization of Japan as a source of knowledge is too bad, especially at this very moment, when the world and in particular Washington could learn a great deal from Japan in connection with the credit crisis. This quite aside from the fact that Japan remains the world’s second largest industrial power. What makes Japan so important and interesting as a source of knowledge? It forces anyone who is serious about its complexities to rethink matters long taken for granted in the United States and Europe. The kind of knowledge one can gather from Japan, aside from the kind known as marketing, is conceptual. Again and again, when considering things Japanese, I can get excited about the way in which its ways undermine commonplace beliefs about politics, about social life and, especially, about economic matters. How that came to be is an interesting question. I am inclined to think that the combination of Japan’s highly sophisticated culture and the three centuries of isolation in which it developed has much to do with it. In any case, Thailand or Malaysia, or France,...

...governments got stranded, as the elected politicians were no match for the bureaucrats controlling their own lines of communication with the administrative apparatus. It took five years for the reformists to come together in the DPJ, the first credible opposition party that was prepared actually to win elections, and replace the façade of government that had become the norm under the LDP with genuine cabinet-centered government intent on actually governing. The Socialists had only been interested in mere ritualistic opposition. To gain a good picture of Japan’s political situation, one must realize the hugely important role played by the main newspapers in creating what is understood to be political reality. Especially when major changes are afoot the papers tend to speak with one voice, which is normally critical of anything that threatens the established order. Senior editors share what must be graded as no less than an obsession of the senior bureaucrats with social tranquility and harmony. Hence the coming to power of the DPJ has awakened strong forces aiming to diminish its prestige and ridicule its actions. This must be kept in mind when one judges, with nothing else to go on than media evaluations, how Japan’s current government...

...United States, which is the shorthand version still carried through till today. That the Obama administration was trying to overthrow the first DPJ cabinet was by December 2009 clear enough to me to write about it in Japan. It was altogether predictable, and the American officials knew that they could leave it to Japanese players – advisers enamored of the status quo, editors of the mainstream media who are obsessed with maintaining order, the LDP in opposition – to do it for them. Hatoyama, still hoping for a perfectly justified face-to-face meeting with the president of Japan’s supposedly most important ally, was misled by his America handlers and made the mistake of binding himself under great pressure, and under the impression that a compromise with Washington was being prepared, to an unnecessary deadline of May 2010 for the Okinawa plans. He has told me that he considers this the biggest mistake of his political life. The downfall of the first DPJ cabinet had a demoralizing effect on this reformist party. The prospects for realizing policies listed in the manifesto with which it had secured a great election victory dimmed significantly. All DPJ plans for positive engagement with the countries on...

...to NorthKorea. Earlier in Munich, Vice President Joe Biden aimed threatening language at Iran. Both countries are suspected of being at the point of stepping over the nuclear threshold, but that has so far not inspired official America with new thinking. It is possible to see ElBaradei’s musings as an attempt to encourage Obama to seek new directions by reminding him of his own earlier pronouncements. ElBaradei: “President Obama has pledged to seek a world free of nuclear weapons – a legal commitment under the Non-Proliferation Treaty”. The last point is pivotal; or ought to be that. The NPT, dating from 1968, starts from the premise that there are two categories of countries: those with and those without nuclear weapons. The latter signatories committed themselves to forego the use, the manufacture and the acquisition of a nuclear arsenal. The haves committed themselves to eventually giving these up. As it happened, various further treaties have been entered into, but “arms control” has been revealed as something rather different from disarmament. Notwithstanding all the treaties, new nuclear poweres have emerged: India, Pakistan, and Israël. The least that one can say about this is that in this matter countries are judged by contradictory...

...advocated that Japan should become a “normal country”, by which he meant that it should be waging conscious politics, seriously discussing desirable policies and finding ways to implement them. Political control over the bureaucracy is an inevitable element in that development. And such steering control should make it possible for Japan to free itself from a deep dependency on the United States. Japan may not be a protectorate of the United States in name, but in practice it is about as close to being a protectorate as possible. Except for Japan’s domestic affairs, which Washington does not understand and over which it has, at best, only sometimes a very tenuous grip. Ozawa combines a very good understanding of what ails Japan politically with tactical skills in dealing with entrenched power and recalcitrant members of the Minshuto party, which he did much to help give shape and prestige. It has been only in the last six years or so that Japan has a credible opposition party that could conceivably take over from the LDP. When my Japanese friends told me in January that Ozawa would probably be the next Japanese prime minister I asked them: but what of the coming scandal?...

...propagation of false stories. We must not forget that false stories crowd out true stories – or those more closely approximating the truth – from the front and opinion pages of newspapers (which, for all their decline and diminishing importance, still direct the non-frivolous fare on TV and the Web). There are many ways in which false stories are amplified and come to us from different directions. Big false stories, the ones that protect many smaller ones against critical examination, tend to have a long life and crucially influence the way in which people live their lives on large patches of territory, spanning many countries, of our globe. Those big false stories are usually rooted in older stories that may have been partially true. And so it is with the two main false stories that I think have more than any other influenced the life on our planet for the past 20 years or so – the period we could call the post-Cold War era. One of them is composed of the ideas that have collectively been labelled ‘neoliberalism’, and the other one – the term ‘realist theory’ covers much of it – consists of a set of ideas around...