Cutting off Iranian oil imports has put Tokyo in a difficult position. The United States and its European allies have already agreed to up the ante on sanctions against Iran, but the domestic costs that Japan has to bear in order to cooperate are higher.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s government has indicated its desire to cooperate, and last December the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced new restrictions on the operations of 106 entities as well as one individual with potential links to proliferation-sensitive activities in Iran. But the real effort now is to reduce Japan’s oil imports from Tehran, and to negotiate an exemption from more stringent restrictions on Japanese banks included in the new U.S. sanctions law. Read more »

Water is an issue that preoccupies Chinese officials throughout the country, but nowhere perhaps as much as in Beijing. The already water-scarce capital has been suffering a continuous and precipitous decline in water availability over the past decades, as both population size and income levels have grown dramatically. Caixin magazine has a terrific new piece that details not only the current crisis but also the historical challenges Beijing has faced. The piece also explores what the capital should be doing but isn’t. Experts, for example, have been pushing pricing reform, water conservation, and recycling. Some of this is being done, but not enough. Instead, Beijing’s plans center on desalination, exploiting karst resources, and the South-North Water Diversion, each of which, as the article discusses, brings with it additional economic and potentially serious environmental costs. Read more »

Today’s Washington Post has a useful article outlining the plans for a much greater U.S. military presence in the Philippines. The article discusses all of the potential options being put on the table between U.S. and Philippines officials: “Operating Navy ships from the Philippines, deploying troops on a rotational basis and staging more frequent joint exercises.” Read more »

Kong Qingdong has gone viral. The Peking University professor of literature and descendant of Confucius has become an overnight celebrity with his televised rant against Hong Kong. In a televised interview, Kong rails against non-Mandarin speaking Hong Kongers, denounces their rule of law system, and calls them “running dogs,” a Maoist-era epithet that typified the class warfare of the 1950s and 60s. What induced this attack was a momentary interchange on a Hong Kong subway between a Hong Kong resident and a mainland woman, in which the Hong Konger told the woman that her child should not be eating on the subway. Read more »

A fascinating recent piece in Forbes discusses the new and palace-promoted biography of Rama IX, King Bhumibol Adulyadej: A Life’s Work. Although much of the biography apparently borders on hagiography (I have not received it from Amazon yet), there is considerable detail in it on the vast holdings of the Crown Property Bureau (CPB), which normally are kept very quiet. The CPB, which as Forbes notes manages the palace’s investments, holds enormous amounts of land across Thailand, as well as stakes in many of Thailand’s biggest companies including Siam Cement and Siam Commercial Bank. Read more »

Today’s Washington Post has an extended interview with Burmese president Thein Sein, who met Post senior associate editor Lally Weymouth. The interview is fascinating simply because of its novelty: Burmese leaders in the past shunned reporters like they had the plague. When I worked for a newswire in Bangkok in 2000, we tried to get even lower-ranking Burmese officials to talk to us about very noncontroversial subjects, such as upcoming Asean meetings. We never got anywhere. Read more »

North Korea’s leadership succession from Kim Jong-il to Kim Jong-un has gone according to script. The Korean Worker’s Party and the Korean People’s Army are supporting Kim Jong-un as North Korea’s new leader and North Korea’s propaganda machine hasn’t missed a beat in announcing new titles, manufacturing accomplishments, and portraying Kim Jong-un as a Great Successor worthy of the name. But despite these efforts, there are two notable missing pieces: Read more »

With the upgrading of American diplomatic relations with Myanmar, and a wave of political reform in the country over the past year, many businesses have begun eying the Southeast Asian nation, which has a population of over 50 million people and has been essentially isolated from Western companies by U.S., Japanese, and EU sanctions. A delegation of Japanese business leaders recently visited the country, as did an American delegation. Business magnate and philanthropist George Soros also visited recently (of course, the U.S. would have to drop sanctions for investment to happen, but that is looking more likely). Read more »

Today’s meeting among U.S., Japanese, and South Korean envoys to discuss policy coordination toward North Korea is a welcome step forward that builds on a foreign ministers’ meeting held in Washington on December 6, 2010, in response to the North Korean artillery attack on Yeonpyeong Island.   That meeting resulted in an ambitious joint statement illustrating the depth of like-mindedness among the three countries.  The idea of strengthening the trilateral relationship has great potential but it has also been frustratingly slow to materialize in practice. Read more »

North Korea has done its best in the weeks since Kim Jong Il’s death to project an atmosphere of calmness, continuity, and stability in the transition from Kim Jong-il to Kim Jong-un. Despite significant differences between 1994 and 2011, including the weakening of ideology, the lack of a long apprenticeship for Kim Jong-un, and an increasingly penetrated North Korean society, the North Korean leadership has been following the script provided by the succession of 1994 through its handling of the funeral arrangements and initial efforts to elevate Kim Jong-un as a leader. Read more »