What is the US agenda behind Mike Honda?

In regard to the heat around WWI comfort women in Asia and the denying of PM Abe, Japan Probe has a note elaborating around the fact that Abe's stance is nothing new. But more to my concern is Observing Japan of March 3 that rather shifts the focus to the blaming side, that is the US, questioning the "thought police" state syndrome of that country. One further step of drilling into the situation I have yet to read about somewhere is an analysis on why all this is happening now, and what is the US agenda behind, or above, Mike Honda's activism. Japan is clearly shooting its own feet as far as sitting at the UN Security Council objective is concerned. Just a guess that may be the key agenda factor.
One obvious side comment for myself is that despite time consumption, the fact is that cross-reading the growing number of blogs examining Japan these days opens up a way much interesting vista to the subject, more than what traditional media has been delivering.

A longer rhetoric on WWII comfort women

LDP young politician Ryuichi Yoneyama has a open letter to US Representative Mike Honda around the resolution on the comfort women issue Honda is trying to push through the US House of Representatives. Although Yoneyama stance is basically what Abe is said to have blurbed out a few days ago - namely the lack of historical proofs of systematic, government managed sex slavery, this letter is an articulated argumentation on an issue where, as with other issues, media pick or fabricate selected small sentences to generate emotional reactions and not much anything like a debate. Whether Yoneyama who is an ex-Harvard physician wrote that letter alone or not is not the issue. The point is that it offers an articulated argumentation and a glimpse at a possible new style of next generation Japanese politician rhetoric.

If past similar utterance is of any value as a reference, Education minister Bummei Ibuki qualifying the other day Japan, that is, Japanese people, as an "extremely homogenous" country may not invite more than internal criticism from Ainu indigenous people in 1986 when Prime Minister Nakasone voiced over the "homogenous race" tropism of perfect nihonjinron.

More interesting, or rather troublesome is the reference to "too much human right" as an equivalent of Metabolic Syndrome as a result of butter overconsumption. This could be a courteous hint directed at China although I don't believe Ibuki smart enough to rehearse his speech strategy before delivering. There is at least a strange sense of deja-vue with all this nihonjinronism around, what with a new fishy book around a Jewish plot to master the world, tow among other iconic items of twenty years ago. This doesn't smell of butter but of bubble instead.

Will Japan catch this opportunity?

Japan in amber has an article with a set of links to the Iranian Amine family affair.
The Japan Times wrote:

"Justice Minister Jinen Nagase hinted Tuesday that the ministry might agree to a request from an Iranian family facing deportation that the 18-year-old daughter be allowed to stay if the family makes it clear the rest will leave Japan by the Friday deadline.
The family, which has been here illegally since the early 1990s, had asked that the government allow the elder daughter to stay here to go to school in exchange for the rest of the family leaving the country. Maryam Khalil has been accepted to a two-year program starting in April at a junior college in Gunma Prefecture."

Why a country minister would "hint" rather than clearly "tell" goes beyond my understanding, but what Mr. Nagase wants is the Amine family to go "voluntarily " back to Iran, allowing Japan not to be condemned for deportation. There are several possible scenarios here. The less plausible is that Japan changes its national mind and allow an extra stay duration by tomorrow. I would not totally void that scenario but I hardly can believe in it. The other one is that the Amine family will be secretly allowed once in Iran to apply for official immigration to Japan. Of course, how will the Amine family be welcome back in Iran and dealt with is open to conjecture but Japan may have asked Iran for leniency. That is before Japan announcement of sanctions toward Iran. The other scenario is that the Amine family be allowed to leave Japan for a third party country and wait there until things settle. This would have been a possible narrative granted Japan could mentally deal with such international combination. But after all, it's an internal affair, so why should and could the Amine family end up in Los Angeles? And why couldn't it be? As for Maryam Khalil who is probably very much Japanese at heart and in the mind, it is much possible that she finds a job after her graduation in two years. Despite the setting of a jurisprudence that Governor Ishihara and his racist followers will rant at, Japan has an opportunity here to show a more benevolent face toward the inevitable fact that it already needs more arms and brains to compensate for the coming lack of these.

On some views from Tokyo

There is a moment in time of convergence where scattered people start to think more or less the same thing about some subject. Let's call this subject "The Tokyo" moment. The thing they are thinking is about frustration with the media coverage in their language on the country they are living in, or at least the country that is their major focus of interest. The country I am referring to is Japan. Thanks to this technology and circumstances I wish to try and list up here, more than one people are blogging about Japan, with a focus less on the frivolous and more on matters dealing with politics, economics and sociology. All of these pertaining to Japan, where most of these people live or will be living soon. I am one of them. Some reasons in the following list are very much subjective and may prove to be wrong if serious study was applied to these. Here it goes, anyway:

I have been living in Tokyo for the past +20years. Used to be a freelance journalist for close to 15 years. There has never been such a large volume of written material about Japan, especially Tokyo, since blogging has been around. Despite this, knowledge and interest for political matters that go beyond the anecdotal are at a low ebb. In consumer media at least, I usually feel that coverage about Japan has not much changed in the past 20 years.

Sometimes while being here, you start both being bored by the local politicians, yet you can't agree to simply look the other way. The minimum of involvement a gaijin is allowed to is to be at least interested about what those boring politicians say, or rather why and how they behave in boring manners. Some are not boring at all. And what they say and do, or usually don't do have some impact not only on the locals, but on the gaijin who is at list a local like anyone else.

I could go on like this trying and figure out more reasons about the launching (small did, will he be still around next week?) of Good Morning Tokyo. But I would rather stop it and start getting to the gist of things soon. But before that, let me end this with a few more "personal" reasons why I blog here. As the previous sentences tell, I am no native English writer and speaker. When I started learning Japanese back in the early 80's in Paris, France, no serious, thick Japanese-French dictionary was available. Every student would one day cut an arm and a leg to buy the Kenkyusha door stopper. Learning Japanese came with learning more English at the same time.
I started blogging in akward English here, then switched to French in 2005, and am still doing it the French way pretty much daily. However, my blog reading habits bring me back to English mostly. Coverage about Japan in French media is paltry at best. When it comes to serious matters, I have yet to find any example of a French blog dealing with Japanese politics, economics and social matters. Anecdotism, a fatal disease, is rampant. As a consequence, and in order to try and be part of the loop, it does make sense at least to me to try and add this little voice to the small but growing number of bloggers whose scope of interest is less focused on Harajuku and Omotesando, and more on the tangible matters of down to earth Japanese reality.
Thus, Good Morning Tokyo.