Joanna (channeling Brad Meyer) posted:
The Japanese bourgeoisie, like its American counterpart, has no consensus answer (they do not know what to do), leaving a political vacuum permitting its officially most radical, fanatical factions to move into the centers of state power. It is only because this faction is the most mindless adherent of the America Cult - all while they make neo-'nationalist' claims to make Japan a 'normal' country again - that it will lead Japanese society towards a profound crackup bringing an end to an era of unparalleled peace and prosperity for this country. And here is the supreme irony: in doing so they will undermine the last remaining anchor of the otherwise rapidly deteriorating state of American global power as we have known it since the end of WW2. For these days it is only the Battleship Yamato that keeps the USS Enterprise afloat.
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Outside of US political currents, the countries I pay the most attention to, due to personal connections and their global importance, are Japan and South Korea.
My non-specialist reading of the situation (assisted by alert and watchful friends in Tokyo and Seoul) puts me more or less in agreement with Brad's take.
As he said in an earlier forwarded post, a clever strategy for Japan would be to accommodate itself in a managed way to growing Chinese power, cooperate more closely with the other regional players and place its alliance with the US in a more sensible perspective -- one that led to far less of the odd brand of servitude, intermixed with nationalist delusions, that's defined pretty much all of the postwar years.
But this is not the Koizumi bloc's preferred course. Instead of directing their energies towards a project that serves the long term interests of a Japan that must contend with a very new situation, they hatch a scheme -- the postal privatization plan -- that will unleash an unprecedented torrent of capital, fulfilling the wildest fantasies of capital manipulators across the globe but accomplishing little else.
Some truly interesting things are going to happen now. This is quite big and will bear careful watching.
.d.