Japan

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the NATO and G7 Summits

The density of foreign policy activities by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida cannot but attract attention. At the end of April, he received German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Tokyo. Immediately after that, he went on a week-long tour to three countries in Southeast Asia and a subsequent flight to Europe. There, he held talks with […]

Japan: Trials and Tribulations of a Land of “Honorary Whites”

Of the many descriptions of the Japanese people readers are familiar with, e.g. industrious, polite, clean, etc., the description of Japanese as “honorary whites” may well be a first for many. Yet, it was not long ago that this term had official standing, albeit in apartheid South Africa. In the 1960s Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd determined it would be to[Read More...]

Shangri-La Dialogue on the Issues of International Security

A new (19th) Shangri-La Dialogue was held in Singapore on June 10-12 to discuss regional security issues. It was initiated and co-organized by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, which is rightly seen as one of the world’s most respected “think tanks” specializing in research on a wide range of issues summarized by the […]

In Japan, Criticism of the Government Grows Over the Losses Caused by Sanctions against Russia

Against the background of the current Japanese government’s clearly ill-conceived policies, which are causing ever greater misery for its people, criticism of Fumio Kishida’s cabinet has increased markedly, with his rating dropping by a further 4.6 percentage points to 56.9% over the month. This is evidenced, in particular, by published data from a survey conducted […]

How Washington is Turning the Pacific into a New Theatre of NATO’s Conflict

In April, at a press conference in Poland, the US Secretary of Defence Austin Lloyd openly declared that the core US objective in the Russia-Ukraine conflict was/is to weaken Russia militarily in ways to make its recovery difficult if not impossible for a long time. Austin said, “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree […]