Meet Katsunobu Kato

The man PM Abe has chosen to lead the LDP's efforts to foster economic and population growth is not a household name.  Katsunobu Kato however is known in the nationalist circle of Tokyo.

Kato twice failed to get elected to the Diet in 1998 and 2000 due to his anti-Korean rhetoric.  Kato accused South Korea of conspiring with North Korea to abduct Japanese citizens.  Kato has denied the use of sex slaves and has often said that reparations to Koreans are "an insult to Japan's dignity as they help perpetuate a lie."

Kato does not stop at his disdain for Koreans and a need to revise history though.  Kato also is against Abe plans to expand the role of women in Japan.  Just last Monday, Kato noted, "I do not understand how we can grow the population and have women in the work place.  Either women care for the home or they should stay single.  It seems Abe wants to cater to the liberal I want it both ways crowd."

Kato is also openly affiliated with the Nippon Kaigi.  This nationalist and far right wing organization seeks to completely do away with Article 9 of the constitution.  Approve history textbooks for schools that portray Japan as fighting WWII to save Asia from European and American imperialism.  Revise the use of sex slaves, POW torture, Unit 723, and the invasion and slaughter in Nanjing.  PM Abe serves on the executive committee with Kato.  All of the Abe cabinet members are chosen from LDP politicians affiliated with this group.

Kato's new appointment as Minister In Charge Of Building A Society Which All Can Participate is seen as a joke among many LDP and opposition party members.  They see this as no more than another office created to bounce ideas but find no solutions.

Masato Imai, Secretary General of the second largest opposition party, Ishin no To (Japan Innovation Party), questioned the necessity of creating the new post.  “I have no idea what kind of roles the minister will play. Abe is trying to appeal to the public with a catch line of creating a society where all 100 million citizens can play active roles,” Imai told reporters.

Kato, a former Finance Ministry official, will also serve as a minister in charge of female empowerment as well as abduction issues.  Ironic considering Kato's stand on these issues.

Abe - Putin Summit Will Change Little

Abe and Putin at UN Sept 28

Among the various disputes in East Asia that have garnered significant attention over the past two years, the Russia-Japanese dispute over the Kuril Islands ( or Northern Territories as they are known in Japan) has been treated as an almost afterthought. While the potential for conflict over this dispute is minimal, it has served to complicate Russia-Japan relations. Recent actions by Moscow have angered Tokyo and while both sides wish to reach a peaceful resolution, Moscow insists that the status of the islands is not up for debate. With Russian President Putin pursuing a more active foreign policy and nationalism growing in Japan under Prime Minister Abe, a resolution to this dispute does not seem likely in the short term.

Several islands in an island chain north of Hokkaido were developed by Japanese migrants from the 18^th century onward and in 1855, Russian and Japan signed the Treaty of Shimoda granting Japan the four southernmost islands in the chain. Japan maintained control of these islands until the end of World War II when they were occupied by Russia. In 1949, Russia deported all of the Japanese residents on them to Japan. Japan renounced “all right, title and claim to the Kuril Islands” in the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty though this was not signed by Russia nor did the Japanese recognize the southernmost four islands as part of the Kuril chain. Since then the dispute has remained unresolved and since Japan views Russia as an occupying force, neither countries have signed a peace treaty to end their World War II hostilities.

There have been numerous attempts at settling the dispute but they have always fallen far short of what Tokyo has sought and what Moscow was willing to concede. By 2013, relations between Japan and Russia were improving and the possibility of a resolution being realized was becoming more likely. The 2014 revolution in Ukraine ended this as Russia-Japan relations suddenly thawed. Since then, Russia has taken provocative military steps in the region and has signaled its intent to retain control of the islands.

This summer marked not only the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory against Japan in World War II and the start of its occupation of the northern territories but also a worsening of the situation. In response to Abe’s June visit to Kiev, Ukraine, Moscow announced that the construction of military facilities in the Kurils would speed up. In August, Russian Prime Minister Medvedev in a widely publicized event visited the Kuril Islands on Russia’s state Flag Day. Tokyo immediately lodged a protest against this visit which was one of many made by senior Russian government officials over the summer.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov commented during the World War II anniversary celebrations that the territorial issues between Russia and Japan had been solved 70 years ago. Japan immediately protested these comments with Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida calling them “unacceptable” and “unproductive and false”.  Later in September, Kishida travelled to Russia on a three-day visit to discuss the disputed islands.  Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov though stated that the only topic to be discussed is that of a peace deal, not the status of the territories. Lavrov said, “Moving forward on this issue is possible only after we see clearly Japan’s recognition of historic realities. The work is difficult and the difference in positions is vast”.

In the past there were indications that Russia might eventually hand over the disputed territories to Japan. Now that does not seem likely as Russia is unwilling to portray the issue as one where Japan has a legitimate claim; instead all Russia wants is to reach a peace deal without a change in territory. As far as Moscow is concerned, the islands belong to Russia and if a peace deal is to be reached, Japan must recognize them as part of Russia.

High-level talks will restart October 12 in Moscow for the first time since last January. It is uncertain though what these talks will produce given Russia’s new position on the issue. Furthermore, Russia cannot afford to suddenly backtrack since such a move would be seen as weakness at a time when Moscow is actively involved in Ukraine and Syria. Japan though will not back down either as Tokyo has nothing to lose. For these reasons, this dispute will continue to live on for years to come.

Stephen Brooker

Thyroid Cancer Rise Linked To Fukushima Radiation

Four Japanese researchers have attributed most of the thyroid cancer cases found among children and adolescents after the March 2011 nuclear power plant crisis in Fukushima Prefecture to radiation from the accident in their report published Tuesday.

Annual thyroid cancer incidence rates in Fukushima after the disaster through late last year were 20- to 50-fold higher than a pre-accident level for the whole of Japan, a team led by Toshihide Tsuda, professor of environmental epidemiology at Okayama University, said in the electronic edition of the journal of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology.

The finding, based on screening some 370,000 Fukushima residents aged 18 or younger at the time of the accident, “is unlikely to be explained by a screening surge,” the researchers said, pointing to radiation exposure as a factor behind the rise in thyroid cancer cases.

But their conclusion is refuted by other epidemiology experts, including Shoichiro Tsugane of the National Cancer Center, who said the results of the researchers’ analysis are premature.

“Unless radiation exposure data are checked, any specific relationship between a cancer incidence and radiation cannot be identified,” said Tsugane, director of the Research Center for Cancer Prevention and Screening. He also referred to a global trend of overdiagnosis of thyroid cancer.

As of late August, the Fukushima prefecture government identified 104 thyroid cancer cases in the prefecture.

But the prefectural government and many experts have doubted whether these cases are related to the nuclear disaster because the radioactive iodine released from the crisis was smaller compared with the level following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident.

Kyodo

Typhoon Nangka Heads Toward Japan

 

Typhoon Nangka remains on a collision course with Japan for later this week, posing significant dangers to lives and property.

Nangka is a powerful typhoon and is expected to continue to strengthen over the warm waters of the open Pacific Ocean through midweek.

If computer models hold true then Nangka will make landfall at Hiroshima at about 7 AM on Saturday, and directly strike Osaka and Kyoto at 9 AM.   Nangka's size means that the major urban areas of Nagoya and Kobe would also be affected by heavy rains causing flooding and high winds.

The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) hopes that the unusually cool waters on the Pacific coast this year would help slow the storm before making landfall.

Tsipras Chooses To Betray Greek Electorate

Merkel and Tsipras prepare to announce deal

An historic betrayal has consumed Greece. Having set aside the mandate of the Greek electorate, the Syriza government has willfully ignored last week’s landslide “No” vote and secretly agreed a raft of repressive, impoverishing measures in return for a “bailout” that means sinister foreign control and a warning to the world.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has pushed through parliament a proposal to cut at least 13 billion euros from the public purse – 4 billion euros more than the “austerity” figure rejected overwhelmingly by the majority of the Greek population in a referendum on 5 July.

These reportedly include a 50 per cent increase in the cost of healthcare for pensioners, almost 40 per cent of whom live in poverty; deep cuts in public sector wages; the complete privatization of public facilities such as airports and ports; a rise in value added tax to 23 per cent, now applied to the Greek islands where people struggle to eke out a living. There is more to come.

“Anti-austerity party sweeps to stunning victory”, declared a Guardian headline on January 25. “Radical leftists” the paper called Tsipras and his impressively-educated comrades.  They wore open neck shirts, and the finance minister rode a motorbike and was described as a “rock star of economics”. It was a façade. They were not radical in any sense of that cliched label, neither were they “anti austerity”.

For six months Tsipras and the recently discarded finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, shuttled between Athens and Brussels, Berlin and the other centres of European money power. Instead of social justice for Greece, they achieved a new indebtedness, a deeper impoverishment that would merely replace a systemic rottenness based on the theft of tax revenue by the Greek super-wealthy – in accordance with European “neo-liberal” values — and cheap, highly profitable loans from those now seeking Greece’s scalp.

Greece’s debt, reports an audit by the Greek parliament, “is illegal, illegitimate and odious”. Proportionally, it is less than 30 per cent that of the debit of Germany, its major creditor. It is less than the debt of European banks whose “bailout” in 2007-8 was barely controversial and unpunished.

For a small country such as Greece, the euro is a colonial currency: a tether to a capitalist ideology so extreme that even the Pope pronounces it “intolerable” and “the dung of the devil”. The euro is to Greece what the US dollar is to remote territories in the Pacific, whose poverty and servility is guaranteed by their dependency.

In their travels to the court of the mighty in Brussels and Berlin, Tsipras and Varoufakis presented themselves neither as radicals nor “leftists” nor even honest social democrats, but as two slightly upstart supplicants in their pleas and demands. Without underestimating the hostility they faced, it is fair to say they displayed no political courage. More than once, the Greek people found out about their “secret austerity plans” in leaks to the media: such as a 30 June letter published in the Financial Times, in which Tsipras promised the heads of the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF to accept their basic, most vicious demands – which he has now accepted.

When the Greek electorate voted “no” on 5 July to this very kind of rotten deal, Tsipras said, “Come Monday and the Greek government will be at the negotiating table after the referendum with better terms for the Greek people”. Greeks had not voted for “better terms”. They had voted for justice and for sovereignty, as they had done on January 25.

The day after the January election a truly democratic and, yes, radical government would have stopped every euro leaving the country, repudiated the “illegal and odious” debt – as Argentina did successfully — and expedited a plan to leave the crippling Eurozone. But there was no plan. There was only a willingness to be “at the table” seeking “better terms”.

The true nature of Syriza has been seldom examined and explained. To the foreign media it is no more than “leftist” or “far left” or “hardline” – the usual misleading spray. Some of Syriza’s international supporters have reached, at times, levels of cheer leading reminiscent of the rise of Barack Obama. Few have asked: Who are these “radicals”? What do they believe in?

In 2013, Yanis Varoufakis wrote: “Should we welcome this crisis of European capitalism as an opportunity to replace it with a better system? Or should we be so worried about it as to embark upon a campaign for stabilising capitalism? To me, the answer is clear. Europe’s crisis is far less likely to give birth to a better alternative to capitalism …

“I bow to the criticism that I have campaigned on an agenda founded on the assumption that the left was, and remains, squarely defeated …. Yes, I would love to put forward [a] radical agenda. But, no, I am not prepared to commit the [error of the British Labour Party following Thatcher’s victory].

“What good did we achieve in Britain in the early 1980s by promoting an agenda of socialist change that British society scorned while falling headlong into Thatcher’s neoliberal trip? Precisely none. What good will it do today to call for a dismantling of the Eurozone, of the European Union itself  …?”

Varoufakis omits all mention of the Social Democratic Party that split the Labour vote and led to Blairism. In suggesting people in Britain “scorned socialist change” – when they were given no real opportunity to bring about that change – he echoes Blair.

The leaders of Syriza are revolutionaries of a kind – but their revolution is the perverse, familiar appropriation of social democratic and parliamentary movements by liberals groomed to comply with neo-liberal drivel and a social engineering whose authentic face is that of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s finance minister, an imperial thug. Like the Labour Party in Britain and its equivalents among former social democratic parties such as the Labor Party in Australia, still describing themselves as “liberal” or even “left”,  Syriza is the product of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, “schooled in postmodernism”, as Alex Lantier wrote.

For them, class is the unmentionable, let alone an enduring struggle, regardless of the reality of the lives of most human beings. Syriza’s luminaries are well-groomed; they lead not the resistance that ordinary people crave, as the Greek electorate has so bravely demonstrated, but “better terms” of a venal status quo that corrals and punishes the poor. When merged with “identity politics” and its insidious distractions, the consequence is not resistance, but subservience. “Mainstream” political life in Britain exemplifies this.

This is not inevitable, a done deal, if we wake up from the long, postmodern coma and reject the myths and deceptions of those who claim to represent us, and fight.

John Pilger

The Nightmare Of Hillary Clinton

By Dallas Brincrest 

Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about Sir Edmond Hillary, a person of real achievement. I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she claimed part of her foreign-policy "experience" that qualified her to be Secretary of State. 

Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim "worked" well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton's memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the former diplomat.

Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: "It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add." Oh yes, when the liar is caught it is always mommy or daddy's fault.

Perfect, the gullible and low information crowd of Democrats ate it up. It worked, in other words, having been coined long after Sir Edmund became a bankable celebrity, but now its usefulness is exhausted and its untruth can safely be blamed on Mommy. Yet isn't it all—all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga—exactly like that? And isn't some of it a little bit more serious? 

For Sen. Clinton, something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her "greatness" (her overreaching ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with which this is done. In the New Hampshire primary in 1992, she knowingly lied about her husband's uncontrollable and pathological sex life and put him eternally in her debt. This is now thought of, and referred to in print, purely as a smart move on her part. 

In the Iowa caucuses of 2008, he returns the favor by telling a huge lie about his own record on the war in Iraq, falsely asserting that he was opposed to the intervention from the very start. This is thought of, and referred to in print, as purely a tactical mistake on his part: trying too hard to help the spouse. The happy couple has now united on an equally mendacious account of what they thought about Iraq and when they thought it. What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family (dynasty) drama—yet again—a central part of our own politics?

What do you have to forget or overlook in order to desire that this dysfunctional clan once more occupies the White House and is again in a position to rent the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign donors and to employ the Oval Office as a massage parlor? You have to be able to forget, first, what happened to those who complained, or who told the truth, last time. It's often said, by people trying to show how grown-up and unshocked they are, that all Clinton did to get himself impeached was lie about sex. That's not really true. What he actually lied about, in the perjury that also got him disbarred, was the women. 

What this involved was the Clinton Strategy - a steady campaign of defamation, backed up by private dicks (you should excuse the expression) and salaried government employees, against women who I believe were telling the truth. In my opinion, Gennifer Flowers was telling the truth; so was Monica Lewinsky, and so was Kathleen Willey, and so, lest we forget, was Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says she was raped by Bill Clinton. (For the full background on this, see the chapter "Is There a Rapist in the Oval Office?" in the paperback version of Christopher Hitchen's book No One Left To Lie To. This essay, I may modestly say, has never been challenged by anybody in the fabled Clinton "rapid response" team.) Yet one constantly reads that both Clintons, including the female who helped intensify the slanders against her mistreated sisters, are excellent on women's "issues." 

One also hears a great deal about how this awful joint tenure of the executive mansion was a good thing in that it conferred "experience" on the despised and much-deceived wife. Well, the main "experience" involved the comprehensive fouling-up of the nation's health-care arrangements, so as to make them considerably worse than they had been before and to create an opening for the worst-of-all-worlds option of the so-called HMO, combining as it did the maximum of capitalist gouging with the maximum of socialistic bureaucracy. This abysmal outcome, forgiven for no reason that I can perceive, was the individual responsibility of the woman who now seems to think it entitles her to the presidency. But there was another "experience," this time a collaborative one, that is even more significant. 

During the Senate debate on the intervention in Iraq, Sen. Clinton made considerable use of her background and "experience" to argue that, yes, Saddam Hussein was indeed a threat. She did not argue so much from the position adopted by the Bush administration as she emphasized the stand taken, by both her husband and Al Gore, when they were in office, to the effect that another and final confrontation with the Baathist regime was more or less inevitable. Now, it does not especially matter whether you agree or agreed with her about this (as I, for once, do and did). What does matter is that she has since altered her position and attempted, with her husband's help, to make people forget that she ever held it. And this, on a grave matter of national honor and security, merely to influence her short-term standing in the Iowa caucuses. 

Then never forget the “What does it matter?” attitude she took over the death of a US Ambassador and his staff at the US Embassy in Benghazi, Libya. Well, gosh, I can think of a few reasons why it matters. First, it mattered enough for the Obama administration to send Susan Rice to five different Sunday talk shows to insist that the sacking was a spontaneous demonstration of anger over a months-old YouTube video, while saying that there was ‘no evidence’ that it was a terrorist attack. It also matters because Barack Obama at the time had been bragging about crippling al-Qaeda while on the campaign trail. There’s also the matter of Barack Obama’s intervention in Libya and his undeclared war against Moammar Qaddafi.

Surely that on its own should be sufficient to disqualify her from consideration? Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don't show her enough appreciation, and after all she's done for us, she may cry.

Osaka Mayor To Retire After Pet Referendum Fails

 

Osaka voters rejected a referendum on Sunday that would have dramatically reorganized the Osaka city government into a large metropolitan entity, like Tokyo.

The defeat was a stunning rejection of a pet reform project of Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto, an effort he started in 2010.

At a news conference in Osaka after the referendum went down to defeat, Hashimoto said he would keep his promise to retire from politics if it failed and will step down when his term as mayor ends in December.

The result means not only that the Osaka city government will remain unchanged, but that political dynamics at the national level will also move in a different direction.

If Hashimoto leaves the political stage in December, the Osaka Restoration Party, regional party of the Japan Innovation Party, that he established in 2010 with former right wing Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, would have less impact on its national counterpart, the Japan Innovation Party.

The Japan Innovation Party would likely strengthen its stance as an opposition party in the Diet, and the Abe administration may have to revise its strategy for revising the Constitution without the Japan Innovation Party as an ally.

With an Upper House election scheduled for the summer of 2016, some Japan Innovation Party lawmakers, especially those without a base in Osaka, could bolt the party and join forces with the opposition Democratic Party of Japan.

AFP

Abe And Cabinet Pass Military Changes

Japan’s cabinet has approved draft laws which would trigger a dramatic shift in security policy, allowing the military to fight overseas for the first time since World War II.

The proposals would allow Japan to defend other countries under attack.

The latest move comes after a revision of US-Japan defense guidelines which expanded cooperation between the two countries as they seek to respond to China’s increasingly assertive military posturing in the region.

It could worsen ties with Beijing, already strained by feuds over the wartime past and disputed territory.

A spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry responded to the news saying:

“We have repeated many times before that due to historical reasons, Asian neighbouring countries and the international community pay a high level of attention to any changes in Japan’s security policy. We hope that Japan can learn the lessons of history, uphold the path of peaceful development, do more real positive things and play a bigger constructive role in this Asian region in which we coexist for peace, stability and joint development.”

The bills are expected to pass parliamentary approval given the ruling bloc’s majority, although opinion polls show citizens are confused and divided over the changes.

Funahashi, Higuchi, and Shibayama May Be Tried As Adults For Uemura Murder

Update to this story

Murder victim Uemura Ryota at 10 years old

Prosecutors at the Yokohama District Court will decide within the next week whether three minors—arrested for the murder of a 13-year-old boy in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture, in February—will be tried as adults.

The latest development comes after the Yokohama Family Court decided on Tuesday to send the three suspects, two boys aged 18 (Ringleader: Funahashi Ryuichi and Higuchi Toshio)  and one boy aged 17, Shibayama Kazuya, back to prosecutors, Fuji TV reported.

The three were arrested on suspicion of killing Ryota Uemura whose naked body was found on the bank of the Tama River in Kawasaki on Feb 20. Funahashi has told police he killed Uemura with a box cutter that was found near the scene of the crime, while the other two have pleaded not guilty to the murder.

 

Shibayama, Funahashi in pink, Higuchi, and Uemura in cap days before murder

Ringleader Funahashi said that he killed Uemura because he told others how he had been beaten for refusing to shoplift at Funahashi's instructions. Before killing Uemura,  Funahashi said he also ordered him to swim naked in the river to punish him. 

Uemura joined a gang whose members were aged from 12 to 20 last November. Uemura was seriously beaten in mid-January and was rarely seen at school after that.

Police have established from records on Line that Shibayama contacted Uemura on the night of Feb 19, telling him to come out and meet them. The three suspects were identified through street surveillance camera footage that showed them walking with Uemura toward the spot where he was murdered. Footage showed them walking back without Uemura.

The suspects burned the victim’s clothes and shoes in a public toilet about 800 meters from where the victim’s body was found. 

Shibayama said he wanted to intervene when he saw Uemura lying on the ground bleeding, but that Funahashi threatened to kill him, too.

Funahashi in Tweet day after he murdered Uemura

From Jiji Press and Dallas Brincrest.

(Since the court may try the suspects as adults they have been named in the story.  This is legal even if the court decides otherwise.  We are an independent news source with no Press Club alliance.)

Japanese Rice Cartel Members Protest TPP

Japan Agriculture Group Execs Protest TPP

The Japanese city of Narita is best known to the outside world for its major airport that serves Tokyo, the nation's capital city. 

Narita is also a rural area of Chiba Prefecture, however, with a long tradition of rice farming. 

Toward the end of the summer, Narita's rice farmers gather to pray for bountiful harvests. They dance, play music and ride elaborate festival carts. From afar, the wagons appear to glide through a sea of lush green paddy fields as villagers pull them down Narita's placid country lanes. 

This year, some farmers feel that these traditions are in danger of disappearing. 

Japan is planning to join the Transpacific Partnership, or TPP. The government claims the country has begun to emerge from more than two decades of economic stagnation, thanks to heavy stimulus spending. It hopes that deregulation, including liberalizing trade, will help economic growth over the long term. 

But rice farmer and local activist Takeshi Ogura says entering into the TPP would be a bad deal for Japan. 

"Japanese agriculture is pretty costly," Ogura says, "so we don't want the government to treat food as a commercial business. We want it to protect our food sovereignty." 

To be sure, the issue of Japanese agriculture carries some weighty symbolism. 

But the TPP would also liberalize insurance, automobiles and other industries that employ more people and account for bigger chunks of the Japanese economy. 

The TPP includes 11 nations bordering on the Pacific, and its members account for around 40 percent of global trade. 

Ogura is very proud that he grows his own food, and that he lives in a community that celebrates this tradition. He says that joining the TPP would threaten his way of life. 

"The farmland and rice farming is at the core of our culture," he says. "They are linked to this culture through community festivals like this one. But if we stop cultivating the rice, this culture will be destroyed." 

The solidly-built, more than 60-year-old Ogura is a pretty typical specimen of Japanese yeomanry. He farms less than 25 acres of land and has to do sideline jobs to make ends meet. His children are not very enthusiastic about following in his line of work. 

In recent elections, Ogura voted for the Communist Party of Japan. 

Actually, he confides, he's no Marxist. It was a protest vote, he says, to show that he was fed up with the main political parties, because they refuse to stand up and oppose the TPP. 

"They pretend to listen to us," he says. "Especially at election time, they make sympathetic faces, and they're kind of helpful. Some of the candidates promised to oppose the TPP. But they voted for it in Parliament. They really broke their promise." 

Ogura's uphill struggle against the TPP reminds him of another local rice farmer and village chief by the name of Kiuichi Sogoro. 

In 1653, Sogoro traveled from Chiba to Edo, then Japan's capital, to petition the ruling Shogun to ease crippling taxes on local farmers. At the time, this was illegal, and the Shogun had Sogoro and his four sons beheaded for their impudence. 

But the Shogun also reduced the taxes, inspiring local farmers to build a temple in Narita and hold an annual festival to commemorate Sogoro's courageous sacrifice. 

Today, Japanese rice farming is protected by a politically powerful agricultural lobby, and import duties of more than 700 percent. 

It is also the least efficient farm sector among the developed economies. 

Jesper Koll, JP Morgan's Director of Research in Tokyo, argues that Japan can get out of this predicament by having fewer people working on bigger farms, and growing luxury food products for export. 

"If Mr. Ogura were to switch to something called 'Koshi-Hikari,' which is the Lexus brand of rice," he says, "he could sell it for eight times what he can sell it in Japan to department stores in the People's Republic of China." 

And joining the TPP, he adds, would allow Japan to import cheaper foreign rice, and that would save consumers money. 

Takeshi Ogura says grimly that maybe the government will put off joining the TPP, but he seems resigned to the final result. 

"The only reason we struggle on like this is that we have these ancestral lands. We've got to keep them in the family," he says. "But if the rice prices go down, that's the time I'll finally have to abandon the land. We're just at the brink right now." 

NPR 

Editor's Note: 

To really understand this, there is a subtext not clearly stated by NPR that you will need to know. Rice in Japan costs $20-$30 per lb. The reason for this is that the rice farmers in Japan have what we would call a cartel (known as Japan Agriculture or JA) or trust that sets pricing. This has been tolerated because Japan's rice farmers are a protected class by politicians looking to buy their votes.  Because the Japanese government supports the cartel, Japanese consumers have little choice. 

 Nonetheless, the average Japanese household has been switching to foreign rice since the "bubble burst" and Japan began allowing foreign food imports in quantity. California and other rice are now generally used for day-to-day consumption, despite tariffs that make it 7 or 8 times as expensive as it should be. I'm not going to speak to whether this is right or wrong, just sharing the background, as I think any argument, such as those making pro-organic, anti-GMO arguments, needs to understand this context. Where in the West people may contend with a price differential of 20-30% for organic vs. GMO, the Japanese are dealing with something on a completely different pricing level. 

Dallas Brincrest

Obama Lied About Bin Laden Raid

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

Seymour Hersh full article London Review of Books