Japan PM Abe Picks Washington Post for Exclusive Interview, Says China Has "Deeply Ingrained" Need to Spar with Japan, Denies He Said That, Probably Misunderstanding the English Word "Spar"

Prime Minister Shinzo "pork cutlet over curry rice because my stomach is now strong" Abe has abolished the tradition that lasted for time immemorial of reporters asking additional questions after official press conference by following him around, in favor of Facebook. He tells the reporters to go like him and read the latest on his Facebook page.

He also seems to have picked up the same penchant as US President Obama of giving an "exclusive interview" to a particular media of his choice. In Abe's case, it was Washington Post.

Abe gave an exclusive interview with Washington Post right before he departed for the US visit which seemed devoid of meaning except for the domestic Japanese political maneuvre. In the interview, as Washington Post reports it, Abe spoke in unusually great details about China, describing China as having a "deeply ingrained" need to spar with Japan and other Asian neighbors over territory for domestic purposes.

(Photo is tweeted by the writer of the Washington Post article, Chico Harlan. Note the rectangular badges that Abe wears as if he were a military man.　One is for Tokyo Olympic 2020, the other is for Japanese abductees in North Korea, I hear. He wore those same badges when he met with President Obama.)

From Washington Post (2/20/2013; emphasis is mine):

Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe: Chinese need for conflict is ‘deeply ingrained’

TOKYO — China has a “deeply ingrained” need to spar with Japan and other Asian neighbors over territory, because the ruling Communist Party uses the disputes to maintain strong domestic support, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in an interview.

Clashes with neighbors, notably Japan, play to popular opinion, Abe said, given a Chinese education system that emphasizes patriotism and “anti-Japanese sentiment.”

Abe’s theory on the entrenched motivation behind China’s recent naval aggression helps explain why he has spent more effort trying to counter the Chinese than make peace with them: He thinks the fierce dispute with China over an island chain in the East China Sea isn’t going away anytime soon.

Abe spoke about China in what aides described as unusually detailed terms, laying out challenges that Chinese leaders might face if other Asian countries, unnerved by Beijing’s maritime expansionism, decide to reduce trade and other economic ties. China’s government would be hurt by such moves, Abe said, because without economic growth, it “will not be able to control the 1.3 billion people . . . under the one-party rule.”

Abe also laid out his plans for deterrence, which include boosting military spending and strengthening ties with Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and other nations that share concerns about Beijing. Abe, who is to meet Friday with President Obama in Washington, said the U.S. presence in Asia is “critical” to deter China from taking territory controlled by other countries.

His comments came in an interview Saturday [February 15, 2013] with The Washington Post, which The Post was granted on the condition that the article not be published until Abe was departing for Washington.

(Full article at the link)

Then, two days later on 2/22/2013, Washington Post says PM Abe's office protested against the exclusive interview article (emphasis is mine):

Japan says Abe’s quotes about China in Post interview were ‘misleading’

TOKYO — Japan sought Thursday to clarify comments about China that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made to The Washington Post this week, with a top government spokesman saying that quotations published by the newspaper were “misleading.”

The Post had quoted Abe as saying that China’s Communist Party had a “deeply ingrained” need to spar with Japan and other Asian neighbors over territory, because the government uses such conflicts to win strong support from citizens whose education system emphasizes patriotism and “anti-Japanese sentiment.”

“There is no comment made by the prime minister as saying that China wants to clash or [have] collision with other countries,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said. “As I said, as the prime minister said, we value mutually beneficial relations with China based on strategic interests.”

Japan’s response came after China denounced Abe for the reported remarks.

“It is rare that a country’s leader brazenly distorts facts, attacks its neighbor and instigates antagonism between regional countries,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said. “Such behavior goes against the will of the international community. . . . We have solemnly demanded the Japanese side immediately clarify and explain.”

...During the interview with The Post, Abe spoke at length about China, laying out a theory of how the Chinese government, no longer able to promise economic equality, now needs new pillars for its legitimacy. One is economic growth. The other is patriotism, which he said often equates to anti-Japanese sentiment. Those factors, Abe said, push China to expand its maritime territory “by coercion or intimidation,” directed both against Japan, in the East China Sea, and in the South China Sea against its Southeast Asian neighbors.

Then, answering a question about the “maritime issue,” Abe responded, “What is important, first of all, is that their leaders as well as business leaders recognize how deeply ingrained this issue is.”

The Japanese government says that a transcript of the interview posted on The Post’s Web site is correct.

(Full article at the link)

"There is no comment made by the prime minister as saying that China wants to clash or [have] collision with other countries" ... Well, the Washington Post article doesn't say that either. It says China has a need to spar (i.e. argue, or spar as in boxing practice), and that's quite different from saying China wants to clash.

"Transcript is correct"... So what was the point of inviting Washington Post reporters to write up an article?

Reading both articles again, I think I understand better. PM Abe or his spokesman misinterpreted the word "spar".

spar - verb: Make the motions of boxing without landing heavy blows, as a form of training: "broke his nose while sparring". Dispute

In the minds of the prime minister and his men, this word became synonymous with "clash, fight".

It looks that the prime minister made a fool of himself. I bet he doesn't even know it.

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Washington Post Editorial over Senkaku Islands Row: "Cooler Heads Should Prevail"

Washington Post has a short editorial on the Japan-Sino row over the Senkaku Islands, gently suggesting both sides to cool it so that the Obama administration doesn't need to choose between the two alternatives - defending Japan as per the security treaty between the US and Japan, or a "climb-down".

Well I don't think Prime Minister Abe is counting on the latter...

From Washington Post (1/25/2013; links are original, emphasis is mine):

GIVEN PRESIDENT Obama’s preoccupation with ending what he calls “a decade of war,” it’s hard to believe that the United States could be dragged into a military conflict in the western Pacific over a group of tiny, uninhabited islands claimed by both Japan and China. Probably, it won’t be. Yet thanks to a disturbing confluence of events in those countries and Mr. Obama’s own commitments, the chance that it will happen is rising.

The Senkaku Islands, called the Diaoyu by China, have been under Japanese administration since 1895; for decades, China agreed to leave its claim to them on a back burner. But Japan’s nationalizationin September of three of the islets — undertaken in an attempt to head off an attempt by a nationalist politician to gain hold of them — provided China’s military and Communist leadership with a pretext for rabble-rousing.

In recent weeks Beijing’s provocations have escalated from dispatching surveillance ships to the islands to scrambling warplanes in response to Japan’s. China’s state-controlled media have been whipping up something like war fever, with one paper declaring that a military fight is “more likely” and the country “needs to prepare for the worst.” Disturbingly, this provocative and dangerous campaign has been overseen by the new Communist leadership under Xi Jinping, which has ample motive to divert attention from domestic problems.

The political climate in Tokyo, too, gives cause for concern. The new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is a nationalist who has packed his cabinet with politicians who share his aims of boosting Japanese defense spending and standing up to China. Japan has refused negotiations over the islands, declaring that there is nothing to discuss.

The Obama administration has been trying to defuse the dispute, dispatching a senior State Department official to Tokyo last week to call for “cooler heads to prevail.” But Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has also reiterated a position the administration first adopted two years ago: A security treaty binding the United States to defend Japan against attack applies to the islets. That public stance may have been intended to deter China from provoking a crisis, but it also magnifies the stakes for Washington. Should China attempt to seize control of the territory, Mr. Obama could have to choose between backing Japan in a military confrontation and a climb-down that would undermine the “pivot to Asia” he has placed at the center of his foreign policy.

Fortunately, there were signs of a cooling-off this week. Mr. Abe dispatched an emissary to Beijing with a letter for Mr. Xi. The Japanese leader, who has been invited to Washington for a meeting with Mr. Obama next month, should be looking for ways to ease tensions without rewarding Beijing’s belligerence. With U.S. help, it ought to be possible to return the issue of the Senkakus to the back burner, where it belongs.

"Pivot to Asia"? What is that? I've never heard the phrase in the US media but I've seen it mentioned numerous times in the Japanese media and tweets as some kind of a big turning point for the US. From the search results, even the US mainstream media is rather dismissive of Mr. Obama's strategy. Council of Foreign Relations calls it "unnecessary and counterproductive".

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Washington Post on Ooi Nuke Plant Restart: Noda’s Restart Announcement Formented Public Opposition

Surprisingly good coverage (I think) from a newspaper who only carried a short AP article when reporting on the June 29 protest in Tokyo.

From Washington Post (7/1/2012; emphasis is mine):

First nuclear reactor to go back online since Japan disaster met with protests

By Chico Harlan

TOKYO — Protesters this weekend thronged the wide streets in front of the prime minister’s office in Tokyo, and across the country they gathered about a quarter-mile from the entrance of a nuclear plant. They shouted “No to the restart,” and parked cars in front of the plant’s access road, blocking workers from coming or going, according to Japanese media.

But the workers were already inside.

Sunday, at the Ohi nuclear facility along Japan’s western shoreline, those workers went through the technical steps to reboot a reactor, the first to come back online since last year’s massive nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi.

The restart at Ohi — with potentially more to follow — will avert dire power shortages and sustain the economy, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has told the nation. But the restart also has divided the country, staging an increasingly hostile showdown between the government and those doubtful about its atomic safety claims.

Some political experts thought Noda’s announcement two weeks ago about the restart of two reactors at Ohi — the No. 4 unit is scheduled to restart later this month — would quiet public opposition. Instead, Noda’s announcement fomented it, and social media-organized protests that once drew hundreds now draw thousands. A Friday rally in front of Noda’s office drew 17,000, according to police, though organizers put the number around 200,000.

The central government has so far given no indication that the public display will cause a rethink of its nuclear restart efforts. Wide-scale protests are rare in this country, where people traditionally comply with authority figures, and Noda, who is also pushing for a consumption tax increase, faces a backlash for his pro-nuclear stance.

In a Pew Research Center poll earlier this month, 70 percent of Japanese said they favor a reduction in the country’s reliance on nuclear power. The government, before calling for the restart, received approvals from local and regional officials near Ohi, a process that required months of persuasion.

Engineers at Ohi planned to pull out the control rods that prevent nuclear fission on Sunday evening. By Wednesday, according to Japan’s Kyodo news agency, the 1,180-megawatt reactor will begin transmitting power.

Before the series of meltdowns at the Fukushima plant, which forced the evacuation of more than 100,000 people, Japan depended on its 54 reactors for roughly one-third of its energy. But in the wake of the accident, those reactors steadily went offline, either because of safety concerns or for routine maintenance checks. In early May, the final reactor in Hokkaido went offline and the country became briefly nuclear free.

Noda became a voice for the restart, and last month he said that a failure to restart the reactors would jeopardize life as Japanese knew it. The government forecasted energy shortages during the sweltering summer — nearly 15 percent in one region, known as Kansai, that had been particularly atomic-dependent. Japan picked reactors No. 3 and No. 4 at Ohi as the first to restart because they supplied the Kansai region and because they had already passed stress tests to gauge their response to disasters.

The restart comes at a time when policymakers here are planning the country’s energy future. The so-called Energy and Environment Council is debating three options: By 2030, nuclear power will account either for 20 to 25 percent of Japan’s total electricity share, 15 percent, or zero percent. The council is supposed to reach a decision in August, Japanese media have said.

Well, workers had to take a ferry boat to the plant. And "months of persuasion" is an obligatory tap dance, so to speak, to give the impression to the gullible public that it has been a hard decision. Washington Post should know, as it is the same in the US.

If the writer, who is based in Tokyo, had spoken with protesters anywhere in japan, the protesters would have told him that they'd rather have a rolling blackout or rationing than the restart of nuclear power plants.

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Japan's PM Noda's Op-Ed in Washington Post: "A year after the earthquake, building a new Japan"

Whoever translated this piece has my sympathy. It's hard to translate sentences devoid of meaning. I can almost see through the original Japanese words, cliche after cliche after cliche.

Noda's op-ed, from Washington Post (3/9/2012); emphasis is mine, and my comment in blue italic in square brackets:

A year after the earthquake, building a new Japan

By Yoshihiko Noda, Friday, March 9, 5:01 PM

March 11 is etched in Japan’s collective consciousness. Today, on the first anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, which triggered the starkest crisis our country has faced in a generation [let's see, a generation is 30 years. I think he meant at least 2 generations, so it goes back to right after World War II; otherwise it doesn't make any sense], we pause to commemorate all of those who suffered. Our thoughts go out to all of the victims of the tragedy and to people around the world whose lives have been devastated by natural disasters.

We will not forget the loved ones, friends and colleagues lost in the disaster. Nor will we forget the outpouring of support and international expressions of solidarity that Japan received. For this, we feel deeply indebted and forever appreciative. [I remember they dare returned blankets donated by Indonesia, because the blankets didn't meet the Japanese specs. Some appreciation.]

Japan has made remarkable progress over the past 12 months. Today we renew our commitment to learn from the great difficulties we have faced [you are still facing them]. I firmly believe that this period of difficulty must, and will, come to mark the start of a full-fledged revitalization of Japan.

The national solidarity and sense of urgency that resulted from last year’s tragedy underscore that we have the collective will to tackle our most pressing issues [I hardly sense any solidarity, any sense of urgency, or collective will; for once, ordinary Japanese are not really into "collective" anything]: reconstruction of areas affected by the earthquake; full decommissioning of Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and decontamination of affected areas; and revitalization of the Japanese economy.

The many steps taken in a year included establishing a budgetary and legislative framework that laid out many of the strategic tools for reconstruction. We set up the Reconstruction Agency, which acts as a control tower for all related planning and significantly streamlines and expedites activities, including formation of reconstruction grants and special reconstruction zones [to hand out pork to construction companies and hand out tax benefits to large corporations]. In addition, procedures for monitoring and testing food products have been strengthened, while more than 1 trillion yen in state funds have been provided for the decontamination of residential areas close to the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The issues of greatest concern among affected individuals, and our nation as a whole, are the most fundamental: job security and a sustainable livelihood for families [those have been totally destroyed by the Koizumi administration]. Through the creation of special reconstruction zones and other initiatives under the concept of “open reconstruction,” these regions will stimulate new domestic and overseas investment, creating jobs, driving the restoration of existing industries and enhancing innovation. [What the hell is open construction?]

The creation of 11 “FutureCities” throughout Japan, in areas including the disaster-hit municipalities of Ofunato, Rikuzentakata and Higashimatsushima, is one such example. Through budgetary, tax and regulatory measures, support will be provided to develop an industry and social infrastructure linked with compact cities and decentralized, environmentally friendly energy production that uses “smart” grids and large-scale solar and offshore wind farms. [Sound like Potemkin Village.] Japan is already a leader in energy efficiency, and it has a wealth of innovative technologies. We must put this expertise to use creating a model for growth and sustainability that we can share with the world.

Another area where Japan can, and I believe must, lead the world and share its knowledge is disaster-risk reduction and response [What knowledge?]. We have learned, in the harshest possible terms, that it is no longer acceptable to claim that events had been unforeseen. To build resilient communities and a country able to withstand natural disasters, our disaster-management measures are being comprehensively reviewed, and I expect they will be dramatically strengthened.

Of course, Japan also faces challenges that were apparent before last year’s earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster. We have been tackling some, such as securing robust economic growth and rebuilding government finances, for a number of years. The longer these issues are left unresolved, the more serious they become.

When I became prime minister last September, I promised the Japanese people that I would not tolerate the politics of indecision. A propensity to delay difficult and weighty decisions has been hurting our country. It is detrimental to our economy, society and future, and it cannot be allowed to continue. [Right. So let's raise consumption tax by 10%, that will bring about true recovery.]

The many projects underway for Japan’s reconstruction and revitalization constitute the first step toward our country’s economic revival [by taking the country deeper into debt?]. Securing robust economic growth is a momentous challenge in the face of global economic uncertainty, the yen’s historic appreciation and long-standing deflation — but it is not insurmountable. [It's been insurmountable for 22 years.]

We must draw on the unique strengths of the Japanese economy [like what?], seek an open and cooperative approach with our international partners, and intelligently exploit the promise of new growth areas. Sectors such as energy, the environment, health and nursing care hold significant potential as leading growth industries where Japan can tap innovative ideas and investment from the private sector, including foreign direct investment [here we go. TPP], and play a leading role globally. We aim to create the conditions to support increased international interest and investment in Japan, not only in business but also in tourism. As a prerequisite, we commit to providing timely and accurate information to the international community.

In recent history, Japan seized rapid economic expansion from the ashes and desolation of World War II, and we built the most energy-efficient economy in the world in the aftermath of the oil shock. On the anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, we remember that today we face a challenge of similar proportions [Similar? I don't think so. It's monumentally bigger]. Our goal is not simply to reconstruct the Japan that existed before March 11, 2011, but to build a new Japan. We are determined to overcome this historic challenge.

© The Washington Post Company

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Washington Post: Biggest CPAC Loser Is Ron Paul

It's just another hit piece on Ron Paul from the establishment.

Winning is losing, losing is winning, you see? Or should I say there is no such thing as losing, it is "unwinning"... (How long do we want to be in this 1984? Like, forever?)

According to Gen-X reporter Chris Cillizza of Washington Post, the biggest loser in the CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) was Ron Paul who was No.1 with 30% of the straw poll.

From WaPo (2/13/2011):

The Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual rite of passage for Republicans with an eye on the presidency, concluded over the weekend with Texas Rep. Ron Paul emerging as the winner of the gathering's 2012 straw poll.

But, sometimes winning can actually be closer to losing -- as in Paul's case - and losing (or at least not finishing in the top few in the straw poll) can mask a winning performance at the three-day convention.

So who are the winners in the eyes of this WaPo writer?

Mitt Romney
Mitch Daniels
Michele Bachmann
Rick Perry
Chris Christie

And the losers?

Ron Paul
Rick Santorum
Orrin Hatch

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