People from the parties that had just tried to vote him out of that office were demanding he stay in that office. While small, the demonstration was significant, for several reasons. First was the fact that while many in Japan are angry after recent exposes of corruption in the Liberal
MoreThere was a time when Australian writings on China were first-class._ _ C.P. Fitzgerald’s classic, for example, ‘The Birth of Communist China’gave us a unbiassed insight to the factors that propelled the Communist forces to their 1949 victory. Postwar, the few who managed to get into China gave us a useful
MoreJuly 9, 2025 Here in Japan that is partly true. The absence of media, political, academic and other forms of serious interest in Japan that I see around me is sad. But at the youth level there is enormous interest, and it owes much to none other than Menadue. As
MoreAfter a long hiatus, relations between China and Japan are finally stirring into action. In late December, Japanese Foreign Minister, Iwaya Takeshi, visited China, where he met his counterpart Wang Yi and other Chinese officials. In the tradition of the 1971 Nagoya ping-pong diplomacy (which saw the diplomatic map of
MoreAs President Trump seeks to bring an end to the Ukrainian conflict, at the Asian end of the Eurasian continent some similar but much less known peace-restoring movements are underway. If both succeed the Eurasian continent could begin to move from an era of incessant conflict to one of ultimate
MoreBegins: It was Kipling, born 1865 India and died 1936 London, who famously said ‘East is East, West is West and never the Twain shall meet.’ Kipling seemed proved right when the honeymoon relations between the Soviet Union and Communist China in the fifties erupted into the vicious Sino-Soviet dispute
MoreRussia and Ukraine Vladimir Putin rarely uses English in his speeches. So if in his speech to the recent BRICS meeting in Kazan he insisted the reason for Russia’s 2022 attack on Ukraine was that he was ‘duped’ (he pronounced it ‘dooped’) by Germany and France in the 2014-5 Minsk
MoreWhat an Aborigine Lady can teach us, Remember the fuss about the ‘stolen generation’ – aborigine children being taken away from their mothers to be raised in Australian families? Conventional thinking at the time said this was a denial of the child’s aborigine culture, not to mention the feelings of
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