US-Japan Ties Need New Push

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s current visit to the United States provides an ideal opportunity to reinvigorate the long-standing US-Japan bilateral alliance in the face of an increasingly aggressive China and persistent tensions on the Korean Peninsula. Read Here – Project Syndicate

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Shinzo Abe Is Brave, But Is He Wise?

Japan’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is proposing a bold departure for his country’s economy. He’s mostly right. Japan continues to underperform, and bad macroeconomic policy has been the main reason. Abenomics isn’t riskless or easy, however. The government will have to be wise as well as brave. Abe advocates what he calls a “three arrows” […]

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7 Reasons China and Japan Won’t Go To War

The sequel seldom improves on the original. Yet Shinzo Abe, Japan’s newly re-elected prime minister, has already displayed more conviction during his second spell at the Kantei than in the entire year of his first, unhappy premiership. Political energy is a plus only when it’s wisely deployed however, and some fear that Abe is picking a […]

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China’s Me-First Foreign Policy

China’s more assertive foreign policy over the last two years has played a key role in getting two arch-conservatives — Japan’s Shinzo Abe and South Korea’s Park Geun-hye — elected to lead their respective countries. Some Chinese observers believe that Abe and Park will be forced by China‘s inexorable rise to come to terms with their giant neighbor. Don’t count on it. To […]

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Keynes, Trains and Automobiles

FOR 35 years the steel bolts holding up the ceiling of Sasago Tunnel, on a busy toll road west of Tokyo, were never checked. On December 2nd more than 600 of them had worked themselves so loose that a 130-metre stretch of the roof collapsed, crushing nine motorists. The disaster played into the hands of […]

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Japan and India’s Growing Embrace

Shinzo Abe is known to be staunchly pro-Indian. Not only did he describe strengthening bilateral ties as extremely important to Japan’s interests in his 2006 book Utsukushii Kuni E (Towards a Beautiful Country), but one of his major foreign policy initiatives during his previous tenure as PM was establishing a new vision for bilateral ties with India. […]

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Japan’s Values Diplomacy

The new Japanese prime minister reiterated his “values diplomacy” recently, confirming his nation’s “pillar” ties with the US and reaching out to two countries in particular, Australia and India. “Freedom, democracy, and fundamental human rights,” Shinzo Abe told the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun in a December 28th interview. “We will deepen ties with nations that share and uphold these values.” […]

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