We produce at least two Shasetsu pieces each month. Current contributors include Garrett DeOrio, Alex Pappas and Ken Worsley. You can listen to Shasetsu here at Trans-Pacific Radio, or you can subscribe and get each episode automatically, as they're released. It's easy to subscribe to Shasetsu: Just copy and paste the RSS feed link for Shasetsu into iTunes or your favorite RSS reader. Don't forget to come here and comment on the issues!

Editor’s note: TPR’s Alex Pappas recently visited the Japanese Embassy of Canada in Ottawa to have a chat with Embassy Counselor Jun Yanagi concerning Japan’s role in global security, its place in the United Nations, and its bid to become a permanent member of that body’s Security Council. What follows is his report on that meeting.

In 2005 under the leadership of then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi Japan began its bid along with the countries of India, Germany and Brazil, for permanent seats on the UN Security Council. But good things as it is said do not come so easily to even those who are most eager. And Japan in particular has had a rather difficult run in convincing the world that it too deservers a seat at the round table of international power.

As it inches ever closer to realizing its goal of being a member of an organization that is charged with maintaining peace and security among nations, the country of the rising sun and its leaders are faced with the challenge of convincing the world of its worthiness and simultaneously charged with distancing itself from the uncomfortable memories of its old but not forgotten past.

A little bit of history; On January 17, 1946, the Security Council of the newly formed United Nations held its first meeting at Church House in London England. In attendance were the P5, or rather the Permanent Members of the Security Council who total five nations; France, England, The Soviet Union, the United States, and the Republic of China.

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By now, anyone and everyone who is reading this article or who has had even tangential contact with the news in Japan over the last few weeks is undoubtedly quite familiar with the remarks of Minister of Health, Labor, and Welfare Yanagisawa Hakuo, calling women birthing machines.

From the blogosphere to the Japan Times to respected former Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, we’ve heard about the trouble Yanagisawa’s remark and its equally awkward follow-up - that healthy couples should want at least two children - have caused. When Yanagisawa irritatedly responded to DPJ Diet member Komiyama Youko’s questioning with “もういいんじゃない,” there were surely a few observers thinking the same thing: enough already.

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This piece was originally published at Japan Economy News on February 7, 2006. What follows is a slight revision to that text.

I said it to anyone that would listen six months ago: When Toyota starts to really catch GM, we’re in for a war of words over currencies. And now that Toyota’s reported 7.3% gain in quarterly profit is fixing GM in the headlights, the war of words is heating up…

And here it comes, just ahead of the G7 meeting and the BOJ’s upcoming February governor’s meeting. It started on Sunday, when the Guardian, in a piece entitled “Japan is currency cheat, claims US,” reported that:

Congress urges Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to use this week’s meeting of G7 finance ministers to accuse Tokyo of fixing the exchange rate of the yen…Michigan [Democratic] Congressman John Dingell sent the President a letter last week - publicised on his website under the title, ‘Dingell to Bush: You Just Don’t Get It‘ - urging the White House to prosecute Japan for currency manipulation.

I found that interesting, given that three days before, on February 1st, Hiroyasu Watanabe, former President of the Policy Research Institute at Japan’s Ministry of Finance, told reporters in Tokyo, “I don’t think the (G7 meeting) will pick up the yen weakness specifically as an agenda item.” Mr Watanabe might be correct, or he might have been speaking prematurely, but in either case, that’s not bound to stop the US Congress from pressuring the White House on Japan’s “currency manipulation.”

Given the fact that the Bank of Japan has been roundly criticized by outsiders as having been politically pressured into not raising the benchmark interest rates last month, it seems a tad hypocritical that US lawmakers are engaging in exactly the same practice with the opposite end: They want to see Japan raise its interest rates so that the yen will stop getting weaker against the dollar. Let’s pause on thinking about whether or not that theory could be true (or ridiculous) for a moment and look at exactly what Congressman Dingell had to say in his “You Just Don’t Get It” letter to President Bush (excuse the long excerpt, it’s worth it):

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“I’m gonna be in the government! It’s gonna be grrreat!“

The high-pitched, quintessentially nerdy, but boyishly excited exclamation resounded in my head with as much attached to it as any quote by better-known men every time I saw Mr. Enoki’s outsized face staring up at the camera with all the excitement any ten men could muster for the local politics of Shinjuku beckoning, “Vote for me. Vote for me,” from the campaign posters plastered up on the walls of old houses, dry cleaners, the train station, and just about everywhere else near my Naka-Ochiai apartment. I have since moved away, but I remember every detail of that poster - his big, goofy grin, the comically large glasses that remain his trademark, the odd touch of including pictures of the assembly hall at the Shinjuku ward office.

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If you’re confused at what the Bank of Japan is doing and how it plans to manage future monetary policies, you’re not alone.

Recently at a press conference Bank of Japan Governor Fukui Toshihiko said that the bank would postpone an additional interest rate increase. But what is most distressing is that it seems as though this decision wasn’t made by the bank and its staff, but by political pressure from the ruling LDP Government.

During the decision process, Liberal Democratic Party Secretary General Nakagawa Hidenao commented that “The government’s views on the economy haven’t changed. There are no rational reasons for the Bank of Japan to change its policy after postponing a decision [ to raise interest rates] in December.”

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The Hill newspaper reported on January 3rd that a Californian congressman is planning to introduce a resolution in the new Congress calling for Japan to formally acknowledge and accept responsibility for sexually enslaving women during World War II.

Japanese-American Rep Mike Honda says he will be prompting intense lobbying activities from the Korean-American community.

Japan argues that it has already apologized and atoned for the treatment of what Tokyo calls “comfort women.”

During its occupation of Asia and the Pacific Islands from the 1930s through the duration of WWII, Japan used as many as 200,000 young women from Korea, China, the Philippines and in some cases Western Europe for sexual servitude, a program designed to increase the efficiency and morale of the Japanese soldiers.

“I look forward to seeking the justice the comfort women deserve,” Honda, chairman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said.

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From TransPacificRadio in Setagaya, Tokyo, This is Alex Pappas with Shasetsu, an editorial.

The United States reportedly wants additional anti-ballistic missile radar systems to be built in Japan. The Pentagon has asked the Defense Agency for permission to install an additional X-band radar system in Japan to reinforce monitoring of possible North Korea’s ballistic missiles aimed at the United States.

The advanced X-band radar system has already been installed at the Air Self-Defense Force’s Shariki air station in Aomori Prefecture.

This news comes on the heals of the December 6 announcement that the United States and Japan plan to build a joint base in the Nagasaki Prefecture for the maintenance of Standard Missle-3 interceptors. According to sources in the Japanese Defense Agency, the facility would be located on a filled-in area off the coast near the United States Navy’s Hariojima ammunitions depot in Sasebo. The U.S. and Japan would each maintain their own missiles, although the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force would be able to ask the U.S. Military for technical assistance if it encountered problems, allowing it to minimize its costs.

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From Trans-Pacific Radio in Setagaya, Tokyo, Japan, This is Alex Pappas with Shasetsu, an editorial.

Let me first briefly say a big thank you to the folks at Trans-Pacific Radio for their warm welcome as a member of the team here at Trans-Pacific Radio dot com.

Getting right to it, a headline that’s coming out right now in Japan, and something that I think is certainly important to talk about is that under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the government of Japan has recently decided to, quote, soften up end quote some controversial references found in the Yasukuni War Shrine in Tokyo.

For those of you not familiar, Yasukuni jinja, a term literally meaning (peaceful nation shrine) is a Shinto shrine that is dedicated to the spirits of soldiers and others who died fighting on behalf of the Japanese emperor in times of conflict and war.

The shrine has been a site of great controversy of the last few decades as several nations particularly China and Korea have taken very vocal stances against its existence. Their opposition comes because enshrined at Yasukuni in what I guess I’ll call a Book of Souls are the names of over a thousand convicted War criminals including 12 Class A War Criminals found guilty by the Allied Tribunal after the second World War.

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December 22, 2006

On this day in 1885, Ito Hirobumi, a central figure in Japan’s Meiji era modernization and a noted womanizer, began the first of his four terms as Prime Minister after reorganizing the government along European lines to establish a cabinet.

Ito was the adopted son of Hayashi Juzo, a minor samurai in the perpetually rebellious Choshu domain, whose leaders had an annual tradition of meeting to decide the Shogunate was still too strong to be overthrown. Not being born into a position the would normally bring political power wound up serving Ito quite well as the eventual success of Choshu’s side, despite a disastrous attempt at uprising, put him at the forefront of loyalists to the Meiji emperor.

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One thing’s for sure: when you invite North Korea to the party, it’s never going to be boring.

On the eve of the resumption of the Six Party Talks, North Korea has accused Japan of kidnapping one of its nationals from Russia in 1991. The man in question is Kim Thae Yong, who reportedly went missing while working as a linguist at a college on Russia’s Sakhalin Island, which lies just north of Japan’s northernmost territory.

In a report issued on Saturday afternoon, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), had this to say:

The insincere approach taken by Japan toward the issue of probing the case is intolerable, both from the elementary humanitarian point of view and the standpoint on improving the DPRK (North Korea)-Japan relations. We vehemently condemn this case as a serious infringement upon the sovereignty of the DPRK as Kim, able linguist of the DPRK, is presumed to be lured and abducted by Japan.

Japan, of course, is expected to raise the issue of its own citizens who were abducted to North Korea at the Six Party Talks, as it has been doing since their inception. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said that there will be no talks unless the abductee issue is on the agenda.

North Korea’s move, which looks like an attempt to force a stalemate over the issue as well as distract the agenda from its true focus (we’re supposed to be talking about nuclear weapons and technology, right?) puts Japan in an odd position: the very nature of its insistence upon discussing the abduction issue has been called into question.

Why is Japan so fixated on using the Six Party Talks as a vehicle for discussing the abduction issue? That’s where the ‘right wing’ comes into play:

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