Kana Inagaki

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Rina Gonoi is releasing a book about her time in Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Forces © FT montage/Getty Images

MundoAsia,

Next Wednesday, Rina Gonoi will publish her account of two harrowing years as a member of Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Forces. It is a blow that will land heavily and with devastating timing.

The book, Raising My Voice, will hit Japan with a grim depiction of life in uniform. Gonoi’s description of a sexual assault involving four drunken officers — a story that emerged last year, triggering an investigation and a string of dismissals — forced unprecedented self-examination on the nation’s military.

Her shocking allegations arrived at what should have been a pivotal moment of confidence and optimism for the SDF, a military force that has existed since 1954 in an uneasy compromise with a constitution that forbids Japan from maintaining “war potential”.…  Seguir leyendo »

Kim Jong Un, centre, at a weapons ceremony in Pyongyang on December 31 © Korean Central News Agency/AP

MundoAsia,

In his last known letter to a US president, an emotional Kim Jong Un rebuked Donald Trump for carrying out scheduled joint military exercises with South Korea.

“I am clearly offended, and I do not want to hide this feeling from you”, Kim wrote in August 2019. “If you do not think of our relationship as a stepping stone that only benefits you, then you would not make me look like an idiot that will only give without getting anything in return”.

The letter marked the end of a turbulent period in US-North Korean relations that included Trump’s threat to inflict “fire and fury like the world has never seen” upon the east Asian dictatorship and culminated in a series of historic meetings between the two men.…  Seguir leyendo »

How long can Japan’s central bank defy global market forces?

MundoAsia

There’s a Chinese proverb that holds it is better to plan one’s means of retreat than 36 different ways to win the battle.

The axiom has cropped up on Tokyo trading floors this autumn, after Japan lavished a record $62bn to fight the yen’s collapse below a three-decade low, in as many as four separate interventions since September.

That is only one front in its war against global market forces. By the end of June, after months fighting to control the yield curve, the Bank of Japan had raised its holdings of Japanese government bonds (JGBs) to over half a quadrillion yen ($3.6tn).…  Seguir leyendo »

Can Japan feed itself?

MundoAsia,

At the end of the month, in supermarkets across Japan, regular staff and a secret army of wholesalers will work the shelves through the night on a project that none of them — from national chains to local stores — are able to talk about openly.

When the food retail industry’s collective doors open on October 1, shoppers who have barely experienced inflation since the early 1990s will be hit by the most severe price shock in almost two generations.

The prices of more than 6,000 daily food items will have soared overnight; so too, say experts whose warnings have long gone unheeded, will the Japanese public’s realisation of what it means to depend upon the most vulnerable food supply system in the developed world.…  Seguir leyendo »

Global inflation: Japan faces a moment of truth

MundoAsia,

In the summer of 1998, the Japanese currency slid to its lowest level against the dollar since the calamitous burst of the economic bubble seven years earlier. A senior finance ministry official, Haruhiko Kuroda, cautioned that an excessive fall in the yen was negative for the Japanese economy.

Nearly one-quarter of a century later, Kuroda is the governor of the Bank of Japan and sounding a familiar refrain as the yen continues its descent through a 24-year low, again breaking the level of ¥137 against the dollar and leaving traders uncertain when the slide will stop.

“The recent rapid acceleration of the yen’s decline is not desirable”, Kuroda said last month, following discussions with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.…  Seguir leyendo »