Left Flank

Weather Vane: The global financial crisis is claiming its first political victim.

South

Rule by Plurality: Controversy dogs signing of 13 PRC-Taiwan deals on direct cargo and charter flights.

Going for the Jugular: A former PRC official is caught on CCTV trying to coerce a Filipino employee.

People Person: Jenny Stangar helps trafficking victims in Australia ten beds at a time.

West

Rule by Gag: Singapore continues to use courts to gag foreign press.

73 Thais injured by two bombs in Narathiwat

Healthy Eschatology: The Dalai Lama has an optimistic, beneficent take on «hell».

Wet: Record flooding afflicts northern and central Vietnam and Yunnan, PRC.

Asian Nepotism: Malaysia's sons get head start on national politics.

Preferred: Microsoft considers PRC the top-rated target for hackers.

North

Danger: A North Korean base at Tongchang-ni capable of firing intercontinental missiles is 80% complete, says the ROK Defense minister.

Hungry: Five US aid agencies warn of food shortages in DPRK.

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Japan's prime minister, Taro Aso, has honed his «pragmatic» creds by firing Air Force Chief of Staff, General Toshio Tamogami.

Tamogami said in the essay that Japan's military actions in China were based on treaties, and that the Korean peninsula under Japan's 1910-1945 colonial rule «was prosperous and safe.»

He argued that Japan was drawn into World War Two by then U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he said was being manipulated by the Comintern, the international communist organization founded in Moscow in 1919.

Tamogami also rejected the verdicts of an Allied tribunal which convicted Japanese wartime leaders as war criminals after Tokyo's defeat in 1945.

Will Beijing and Seoul cut Aso some slack, or pile on?

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Japanese and ROK politicians continue to emphasize DPRK's Dear Leader's absence from major public events.

«Chairman Kim Jong-il is confirmed not to have attended the funeral,» Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon said at a news conference.

A debilitated Kim, who was conspicuously absent from gala ceremonies in September to celebrate the 60th anniversary of his state's founding, raises questions about leadership in Asia's only communist dynasty and who was making decisions concerning its nuclear arsenal, analysts have said.

North Korea's elite turned out for the funeral earlier this week of Pak Song-chol, 95, the last of what the state considers its great, original communist revolutionaries. Pak played key roles under state founder, and Kim Jong-il's father, Kim Il-sung.

Pak was given high posts from the 1950s to the 1970s and due to a carefully maintained ranking system based on a mix of seniority and status, was still among the North's top five cadres even though he has not been active for about 30 years.

According to the North's official media, Kim Jong-il has attended funerals for officials lower on the pecking order than Pak. Kim appeared at the 2005 ceremony for Yon Hyong-muk, who was in the top 20 at the time of his death.

This week, Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso said intelligence indicated that Kim was probably in hospital but still in control of the state. The South's spy chief said Kim was on the mend and still calling the shots.

Earlier this month, the North's official media made its first reports in about 50 days of Kim appearing in public, saying he attended a soccer match and inspected a women's military unit.

But experts in the South said pictures the North released of the military visit were likely taken several months ago, and before Kim's suspected illness.

I find this kind of reporting bizarre. No doubt there are those who prefer anarchy, or just pray for the death of the entire North Korean leadership. I'm not matching them with counter-prayers. Instead of looking for signs of instability, why not seek out stability in those government officials who might play a role in a post-Kim regime?

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Tobias Harris offers not one, but two insightful articles on Japan's Liberal Democrats, and, at the risk of sounding impertinent or opportunistic, I wonder if there's a connection between the LDP's slow death (I'm not quite sure non-subscribers can read this) and its resentment at the Bush administration de-listing of DPRK as a terrorist state.

Firstly, Harris argues that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is looking terminal.

The factions appear to be giving way to a myriad of study groups, Diet members' leagues, and other ideologically oriented party clubs of differing durability and power, as well as tradition LDP informal groups like the so-called policy tribes (the road tribe, the construction tribe, the agriculture tribe, etc.). The new groups include entities like the Club of 83, composed of reform-oriented Diet members elected by dint of Mr. Koizumi's coattails, and the «True Conservative Policy Research Group,» a group led by Nakagawa Shoichi, chairman of the LDP's Policy Affairs Research Council (PARC) under Mr. Abe and including Mr. Abe and Mr. Aso among its approximately eighty members. It is unclear what sway these new organizations have over their members, if any.

Keep reading → Sphere: Related Content

The latest Japanese prime minister's resignation is raising hopes, even as members of the ruling Liberal Democrats (LDP) start to jockey for spots on the party ballot, for the health of Japanese democracy.

Japanese politics may have entered its most exciting period in more than 50 years.

The excitement lies in the probable collapse of the old political order and the realignment it will herald. Of course, such a transformation has been predicted—and avoided—for years. And the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) still has two powerful weapons: its well-oiled machinery of patronage and the incoherence of the main opposition, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). Politics still looks deceptively like business as usual. Indeed, in the end, it was a belated attempt to pursue reform and take on some of the LDP's vested interests that did for Mr Fukuda. He exhausted himself struggling against them. The succession will be decided in the traditional manner: among the LDP's barons, without asking the electorate. Japan will have its third leader in a row not to have led his party to a victory at the polls. Japan's top-down politics stands in stark contrast to America's thrilling primary season.

The LDP's troubles, and by extension, Japan's, bear striking superficial similarities to the American GOP's.

In his pronouncements, Mr Fukuda showed a keen sense of how Japan needed to tackle the burdens of an ageing population and mountainous national debt. He challenged his party's own pork-barrel interests, particularly the road-construction lobby, which not even Mr Koizumi defeated. In foreign matters he kept relations with America from fraying, by using the ruling coalition's supermajority to ram through legislation allowing Japan's navy to refuel ships in the Indian Ocean in support of efforts in Afghanistan. And he deepened Mr Abe's initiatives to warm Japan's ties with neighbouring China and South Korea. But there was no denying it: Mr Fukuda's leadership lacked even a smidgen of colour; the one thing he was not, as he admitted this week, was popular.

Yet, unlike the American economy's, the Japanese economy's problems look lighter.

The biggest contrast with America and Britain is that Japanese households have reduced their debt from 71% of GDP in 2000 to 63% this year, according to Goldman Sachs. This is much lower than debt ratios of around 100% in both America and Britain, where borrowing has exploded over the past decade (see chart). The only other G7 economy where consumer debt has declined is Germany, which has also avoided a housing bubble.

Japanese companies have trimmed their debts even more dramatically, to 78% of GDP from 130% in 1991. The level is now well below where it was before the 1980s bubble, though higher than corporate America's debt of less than 50% of GDP. (American firms have traditionally relied more on equity financing.) On the other hand, corporate debt has expanded rapidly in the European Union.

Heavy debts, falling property prices and a shortage of new credit are a lethal cocktail, which could depress economic growth in America and parts of Europe for several years—as Japan itself found out in the 1990s. Today Japan's economy is much less burdened by debt and so likely to recover more quickly.

Another reason why the downturn in Japan could be fairly mild is that almost half of Japan's exports go to other buoyant Asian economies. Exports had been the main force behind Japan's recovery before they slowed this year. Shipments to America and to Europe have fallen, but demand from the rest of Asia remains strong. In July, for the first time, Japan exported more to China than to America.

Politically, though, as both Garrett DeOrio and Japan Observer relate, the LDP has deeper troubles. TPR has an excellent podcast, in which DeOrio argues that scandals - » 'political funds, pension records, hepatitis C and the Defense Ministry scandals' » - undid Fukuda. Both pundits agree that the front runner, Taro Aso, is not the usual conservative. That will not mean much on the foreign policy plane, where Fukuda's moderate stance worked well with Beijing. The rest of the slate reflects ideological differences and factional splits between moderate conservatives and reformers.

Autumn could bring electoral surprises all around the Pacific Ocean.

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Before the avalanche of nationalistic gripes by governments about how former PM Yasuo Fukuda has undone their plans for dealing with Japan, Japan Observer defends Fukuda.

Fukuda clearly understands how Japan has to change; indeed, he may understand better than just about everyone in the LDP, Mr. Koizumi included. (I'm inclined to agree with Masuzoe Yoichi's description of Mr. Koizumi as a better destroyer than builder - Japan at this point needs the latter just as much as it needs the former.) When he spoke of the hardships facing the Japanese people, I did not question his sincerity.

The problem is that he faced a political situation that would have stumped all but the ablest of politicians, which Mr. Fukuda is not. I think that he would have been a huge success had he followed Mr. Koizumi in 2006, being more of a builder than Mr. Koizumi and probably being better liked by the public than Mr. Koizumi. I don't mean loved or admired in the way that Mr. Koizumi was, like a rock idol, but rather someone who the public would have trusted to listen to them, to be frank with them, and to do his best to address his concerns and begin the hard work of building a new Japanese system for the twenty-first century. Even Mr. Koizumi, for all his popularity, did not enjoy a relationship like that with the public - as suggested by scornful remarks about his policy legacy.

And now, it starts.

Washington has its Japan shopping list.

Fukuda's resignation might have been very well-timed indeed. The lenghtened session could even act as a sort of punishment to New Komeito for its lack of loyalty. A longer session would also allow for the fifty-nining of at least one or two of the contentious, deadlock-inducing measures due to face the Diet this Fall, not least of which would be the Indian Ocean refueling mission, up for renewal again, which US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently urged Japan to continue on her visit here.

I love this comment by a South Korean academic about the delicate state of Japan-ROK relations.

Some are worried that relations could turn sourer amid reports that Taro Aso, a former foreign minister known as being more conservative than Fukuda, will take over the post, while others are taking a wait-and-see approach as Japan's political situation unfolds.

Professor Ha Jong-moon of Hanshin University in Gyeonggi Province described Aso's possible inauguration as ``the worst-case scenario'' for ties between South Korea and Japan.

``Aso is well known for speaking about his opinions on historical and other political issues in a straightforward manner, so I believe bilateral relations would become worse,'' Ha said.

Above all, don't be honest when dealing with South Koreans - it's rude! Most of all, that KT article spends eight graphs on Liancourt Rocks, without once passing concern about how Japan's domestic political deadlock affects any hopes of creating a normal nation with diplomatic relations with its neighbors.

From model to villain, to atomic punching bag, to sugar daddy, and now, pariah - Japan facilitates nationalistic arrogance and government incompetence.

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