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Keywords: Japan

  • AUSTRALIA

    Abe here to spruik his invigorated Japan

    • Walter Hamilton
    • 09 July 2014
    5 Comments

    Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's perspective on modern history would offend most Australians. He sits in the camp that believes Japan fought a defensive war. Abe and Tony Abbott will adopt a series of measures for strengthening joint military exercises, enhance people-to-people exchanges, formally sign a 'free trade' agreement, and much more. A full-course meal that Australians would be advised to chew over well.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    China syndrome haunts Abbott's Japanese jaunt

    • Walter Hamilton
    • 09 April 2014
    3 Comments

    The two powers in Asia on whom our economy and security depend, Japan and China, have reached an impasse. That should not constrain Australia from reaching out to both on the basis of mutual interest and shared values. China has a keen appreciation of the former and an abiding suspicion of appeals to the latter. Distinguishing one from the other and acting accordingly is the first great test of Abbott's statecraft.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Rise of the right in Japan

    • Walter Hamilton
    • 24 February 2014
    4 Comments

    Tony Abbott has described Japan as Australia's 'best friend in Asia'. When he journeys to Japan in April and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe reciprocates in July, the two leaders will move to cement a new 'normal' in the relationship between their nations, including closer defence cooperation. As a correspondent in Japan in the '80s and '90s, I believed Japan's extreme right to be noisy but irrelevant. I'm now coming around to a different view.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Tolerating corruption will destroy Australia's brand

    • Michael Mullins
    • 07 October 2013
    6 Comments

    Australia tied with Denmark, Finland and Japan for the title of the world's least bribe-ridden country in 2013. Our cultural resistance to corruption has long been a major contributor to Australia's reputation as a good global citizen, not to mention economic prosperity. Pope Francis said last week that we all have our own idea of good and evil, and each of us fighting against evil as we conceive it makes the world a better place. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Communist China keeps a grip on the gun

    • Jeremy Clarke
    • 15 October 2012
    3 Comments

    Many people know Mao's famous dictum, 'Power comes from the barrel of the gun'. Fewer people know the second part: that 'the Party must control the gun'. The Party could allow last month's street protests because they unified the people against a hated enemy in Japan. But the protests were carefully controlled.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    POW priest and the sacrament of sport

    • Brian Doyle
    • 18 July 2012
    3 Comments

    The Japanese had taken the island and the priest was imprisoned with many other residents. One Sunday, the POWs set up stumps in the morning, dressed in the best clothes they had left, and assigned teams. One captain was a minister, the other a teacher. The priest opened the bowling. The guards were angry.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Warm bums and nuclear activism in Tokyo

    • Ellena Savage
    • 11 May 2012
    6 Comments

    I took the train into central Tokyo, my bum warmed by the heated seats. Each time we stopped, the train's engine shut down briefly, and the bum heater switch off for a few seconds. Over the loudspeaker I heard 'Setsuden chu', the catchphrase meaning 'We're currently using less electricity', which is posted all around the city.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Dismembering the dead in Japan and Afghanistan

    • Walter Hamilton
    • 26 April 2012
    7 Comments

    The publication of photographs of American soldiers posing with the body parts of dead Afghani insurgents has provoked a lively exchange of opinion in the media. Just as in Afghanistan, American and Australian soldiers fighting the Japanese saw themselves pitted against an opponent who acted by a different — inhuman — set of rules.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    The truth about China the climate scapegoat

    • Sean McDonagh
    • 14 December 2011
    12 Comments

    Countries including the US, Russia and Japan refuse to sign any binding treaty to significantly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions unless China does the same. Their simplistic argument that China is now the number one emitter in the world overlooks important data.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    You are not alone

    • Shane McCauley
    • 18 October 2011
    2 Comments

    Mist moves here, cloaking statues, mild giants that haunt and wait... the slave breathes towardhis freedom.

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  • MEDIA

    Reality trumps Japanese horror stories

    • Stephen Alomes
    • 23 August 2011
    7 Comments

    All too often anxiety trumps reality. In Melbourne in recent years, we received emails from friends overseas worried that we might be affected by the Queensland floods or NSW bushfires, hundreds of kilometres away. Japan has problems, but Japan it is not a disaster zone.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Myths of wartime good and evil

    • Zac Alstin
    • 15 August 2011
    22 Comments

    It is a weakness of human nature that we forgive in our friends what we despise in our enemies. If Germany or Japan had achieved a nuclear weapon and launched it on an Allied city, our condemnation would be unrelenting.

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