Crafton-San

Eric Crafton, Mr. English Only, doesn’t even have to use the old “my best friends are foreigners” routine to defend himself against accusations of being racist. He married one. At the time they married, he was the foreigner though, when he married his wife in Japan.
I don’t think I’ve ever run into Crafton [...]

To Serve Tibet: It’s . . . it’s a cookbook!

Before I was sucked into the bowels of mainstream politics by the lure of late night bashes with lobbyists and White House soirées, I was strictly on the protest politics tip. I’ve done the sit-ins, lived in the shanty towns, marched the march. I’m all for tactics of civil disobedience.
I didn’t like what happened to [...]

Hillary Clinton Ain’t Hittin’ in Japan

This morning I caught the “world news” section of the Japanese language news program Fujisankei News. Sen. Clinton’s “misstatement” on the sniper fire, or absence thereof, during her landing in Bosnia in 1996 was profiled. They used their own raw footage of the event it appears, because I had not seen the footage anywhere else. [...]

Obama Takes Tokyo

Ex-pats and those abroad in the lovely metropolis of Tokyo voted overwhelmingly for Sen. Obama.

I Found Assimilation on a Two Way Street/And Lost it on a Lonely Highway

The Libertarian nativist is sparring with Aunt B over the cultural component of the immigration battle. AC fears that immigration will cause a loss of “cultural homogeneity.” B says poppycock.
Really, a loss of our cultural hegemony is the least of our worries regarding immigration. Immigrants, ethnics, people of color, all realize that part of [...]

PBS airs Richard Perle Infomercial

In the America at a Crossroads series, we witness the fruits of the labor of the Bush administration to promote “fairness” over our national public television network. Richard Perle presented his documentary “The Case for War,” where he walks around the nation presenting his ideas like a neo-con Johnny Appleseed, matching wits with the likes of Pat [...]

VaTech shooting: The view from abroad

I don’t generally comment on tragedies like this. Though it appears the Kampus Kopz there have some explaining to do regarding their handling of the situation, we can grind our axes later.
I hope people noticed the ugly speculating regarding the assassin and his background or identity. I really questioned bringing up the Little Dork [...]

Black Gold

This from an interview with Noam Chomsky featured on Alternet:
Originally the British and secondarily the French had dominated it, but after the Second World War, it’s been a U.S. preserve. That’s been an axiom of U.S. foreign policy, that it must control Middle East energy resources. It is not a matter of access as people [...]

Yasukuni Shrine and Why You Should Care

Outside of journalists on the world beat, all of China and both Koreas, probably only the most narrow focused Western Japanophiles pay attention at all when a Japanese prime minister pays a visit to the Yasukuni Shrine. The shrine is ostensibly a memorial to the Japanese soldiers who died in World War II. However, the [...]