Alejandro S. Arashi comments

China made the mistake of targetting the Philippines, one of the weakest states in Southeast Asia, for diplomatic isolation and military harassment. By harassing both Japan and the Philippibes together China has made it easier to debunk Chinese' blaming Imperial Japan's actions by pointing out that the Philippines gets the same treatment from China even though the Philippines didn't do anything bad to China in world war 2, or ever, really.

TEPCO should be using robots to investigate dangerous site like these

My neighborhood (Koreatown) is apparently chian warui. Of course Japanese standards for dangerous neighborhood is pretty lax ....

I think gentle but regular American threats to leave South Korea should concentrate minds there. South Korea thinks it should triangulate between China and the US for its security. But it's ultimate enemy is North Korea and the main country that will oppose unification would be China. South Korea is just too emotional to face up to its real geopolitical situation.

Not that Japan is any better: If Japan were really coldly rational Japan would do everything it could to cultivate South Korea and detach it from the Chinese common front.

China is really the master of common front tactics to be able to do maximum damage through minimal effort in North Asia. But China's strategy relies on every other democracy being too emotional and distracted to think straight, Eventually, the democracies should figure this out.

Too little too late, both for rhetoric as well as action.

Syria's red line proved to be the proverbial slippery slope. When Obama says all options are on the table his enemies read it as "I will do everything as long as there is no fighting involved, outside of special forces and drones.

The most important part of the reporting is that, as far as South Korea is concerned, its security is based on triangulating between China and the US. The rest are noise.

At the very least the company's insurance rates should go through the roof.

Whether it is negligence ... I'm not sure.

Is there a regulatory or a company rule that sets a maximum number of hours to drive a bus before a mandatory rest (Japan taxis have this rule)? Did the company break this regulatory/company rule?

Is there a regulatory/company rule for hiring/not hiring drivers with sleep apnea? Is there a legal/medical level of sleep apnea beyond which you cannot drive for a living? I have borderline sleep apnea but no one has refused to let me rent a car yet.

What stands out to me about this incident is the driver not taking personal responsibility just before the incident. Even with all of the given circumstances to date (or even while driving) he should realize he was sleepy and just stopped somewhere for a nap. The customers might complain but what can they do, drive the bus?

Seems to me the driver was acting very Japanese with shouganai, nantokanaru thinking. This lack of ultimate self responsibility and judgment rankles me.

No one mentions the most important thing: Hashimoto PM increased the GST from 3% to 5 % and it killed the nascent growth 15 years ago. Abe PM's success regarding this budget will be measured by whether he can prevent the economy from cratering with this 5% to 8% GST increase.

Everything else is noise.

Just agreeing to meet is very big progress, indeed.

Abe tableing review of Kono Statement, then backing down has given Park enough face and credibility to agree to a trilateral summit. Previously, Park wouldn't even set down criteria for agreeing to meet.

Even Chernobyl was never the unmitigated disaster that the nuclear superstitious claim it to be.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qaEKfPlCL_4

And all this talk about contamination fails to understand that radioactivity is naturally occuring, in some places more than others. During 311 I escaped from Tokyo to Hong Kong. Only months later did I learn that HK's naturally occuring background radiation was even higher than Tokyo's after Fukushima.

And the stock of radiation in the seas is magnitudes higher than Fukushima overflow that even throwing all the contaminated water to the Ocean will hardly make a dent in the ocean's stock of radioactivity.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/09/04/solving-the-fukushima-radioactivity-problem-dump-it-all-into-the-ocean/

Lots of headless superstitious chickens around here.

"The models predict levels of Cesium 137 between 30 and 2 Becquerels per cubic meter of seawater by the time the plume reaches the West Coast, Higley said.

The federal drinking water health standard is 7,400 Becquerels per cubic meter, Leon said."

The magnitudes discussed above agree with what I understand to be the insignificance of Fukushima's radioactivity compared with the magnitude of the Pacific and the radioactivity that's already in that Oceans. See article that explains these magnitudes:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/09/04/solving-the-fukushima-radioactivity-problem-dump-it-all-into-the-ocean/

I think the worry is alarmist, but people are free to use their own money to run scientific experiments for their own safety.

Peer review, scientific method, reproducibility of experiments, etc. were meant to uncover fraud or sloppy methodology. This episode proves that the system works.

China is good at getting silly media coverage from these 70 year old events.

On the other hand, Japan's diplomats are pathetic at communicating how polite, considerate, dependable and centrist ordinary Japanese are.

Lol. Said by China who is the number one proliferator

I don't know how this is going to play out. Personally, I'd rather the right-wing loonies in government shut up and be much more constructive, especially to South Korea which Japanese need to ally with against China.

But also, I cannot shake the feeling that South Korea is getting its just desserts by denying forever that there were any Japanese apologies for comfort women, now South Korea is in the position of saying please do not rescind the 1993 apology. Obviously, you cannot rescind something that didn't exist.

That South Korea (and China) now need to acknowledge that there was a 1993 apology by Kono is the only positive advantage for Japan I can see from this action. But do you really have to rake so much coals just to prove there was once a fire?

Baffling.

Ideally, Japan would pull back from the brink of rescission, acknowledge South Korea and China's feelings and the reestablish the import of the Kono Statement of as an official apology in 1993.

Read the article just once but didn't come across anything too bad or too long term worrying.

Most of the trade deficit comes from higher fuel bills because of the shutdown of the nuclear power plants. This is correctable when they go online, eventually, after the new nuclear watchdog finishes their stricter due diligence. Much more important for optics is that the nuclear watchdog be seen to do its job fully, without being hurried by the government, even if TEPCO et all bleeds a lot of red in the meantime.

A bigger worry for me is inflation expectations down the line, but this is the mirror image of deflation that Abenomics sought to solve. To the extent that deflation is licked then congratulations, problem solved. Another issue, another solution, another day.

The other big worry is how to get company profits to filter down to actual paychecks. Raising the minimum wage should be politically popular, but care should be taken to decide to which level. You raise it beyond a certain level and you kill more jobs in order to hand a pay increase to fewer.

What Japan really needs is to unshackle its entrepreneurial energy. In the US talented workers have the option to move to a startup for lower pay but greater eventual upside. Talented workers in Japan do not have this option so employers do not need to pay them higher to stay. Of course, Japanese change jobs much less often, to start with. Although lately, in lieu of pay increases, Japanese workers change jobs every 3 years for an effective 1 Million JPY pay increase. I think that's progress.

Very rich coming from China, which is the world's largest nuclear proliferator directly responsible for Pakistan, North Korea nuclear weapons programs.

@hidingout, thanks for looking into documents already accepted as UNESCO "Memory of the World Registered Heritage". It seems like a letdown as I was expecting a higher level of historiography. However, maybe including both sets of evidence (Nanking and Kamikaze) is the way to increase the profile and improve the standards of that list.

@evian1, Letters from the Taliban would hold greater historical significance compared with "Babad Diponegoro or Autobiographical Chronicle of Prince Diponegoro (1785-1855)" so your slippery slope argument does not hold. Also, rather than just hoping that the Nanjing Massacre papers are accepted third time around, a more reasonable person would first ask why were they not accepted twice already.

@Hatsoff, actually, all this attention does serve someone's interest.

The Chinese Communist Party want people to continually talk about how many the Japanese killed in Nanjing so that no one will have any more time and energy to ask about the 45 Million Chinese that Mao Zedong killed during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.

@Disillusioned, the objective of UNESCO accreditation is not necessarily to determine who are real "heroes". If anything, UNESCO accreditation should help posterity have a much more complete understanding of the complexities of war. Obviously, complexity will not mean one-sided, only one version is true and everything else is false.

HongoTAFEinmate, History is always being used for propaganda and I'm sure there are propagandistic elements with whatever Nanjing historical evidence is presented, as well.

In this game Japan is not the only propagandistic party. Just include all available documents and let historiographers weigh the all the evidence, both pro and con.

Both the Kamikaze letters as well as the Nanjing documents are historical evidence. Let both countries' governments apply for UNESCO accreditation and let the international community scrutiny the documents.

Most of the positions here are either trying to silence one point of view or set of historical evidence when actually the combination of both gives posterity a better appreciation of the complexities of war.

I like the concept but I don't agree with having to pay monthly DoCoMo fees. I'd prefer a wifi version

Is there an sincere, heartfelt, official apology by the Chinese Communist Party for the 45 Million or so people that Mao Zedong killed during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, which unlike WWII happenede during peace time?

I would like to imagine China being under the same self righteous standards as some of the people here purport to arrogantly apply to Japan.

Hide Suzuki is right and is what surveys of Japanese and Chinese public opinion indicate.

On a separate thought, a political party that still keeps Mao Zedong's picture in Tiananmen shouldn't be crowing about another country's Gangster logic.

Sony's PC and TV businesses have been giant zombies for over 10 years now, with Sony never having the guts to restructure them into subsidiary businesses then closed. Sony should just be split into separate movie, playstation and battery businesses, and the rest gotten rid of.

China has been on a military buildup and has been harassing Vietnam, India and the Philippines. Surely you cannot blame Abe for that?

I think the stronger case is that countries around China have been shocked by China's bullying tactics and are forming alliances and constituencies that stand up to China. Japan is just one of those, although the strongest and best able to fight back.

I don't understand why these instalments come out every 6 months. They should just pick the low hanging fruits and implement them immediately. These should create their own momemtum.

On the issue of who Voldemort is, there is a very big elephant in the room. In terms of who is the evil lord who most plunged this part of the world into death and destruction, one man stands out for the sheet number of people he killed. This is made ten times worse by the fact that this evil lord killed all of these men in a time of peace.

Lord Voldemort's first name is Mao.

That's what Compliance Officers are for: The loan officer doesn't need to reject the lian directly and just blame headquarters