The Real Pirates of Somalia

By Maidhc Ó Cathail. Published in Kansai Time Out, May 2009.

Sending the Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyers Sazanami and Samidare 12,000 kilometres from Japanese shores to combat piracy off the coast of Somalia clearly marks a further dimunition of Japan’s postwar pacifism. While it has been suggested that China’s decision to send some of its fleet to the region was the catalyst for Tokyo to join the international naval operation, the predominant motive is more likely to have been Japan’s eagerness to flex its substantial but as yet unused military muscle on the world stage.

Mr. Dickerson Goes to Yokota

By Maidhc Ó Cathail. Published in Kansai Time Out, April 2009.

A high-ranking U.S. Air Force officer and his Turkish wife, alleged to be part of an international weapons smuggling ring by an FBI whistleblower, moved to Yokota Air Force Base in Japan in 2006. According to former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, Lieutenant Colonel (then Major) Douglas Dickerson and her fellow translator Melek Can Dickerson tried to recruit her to this network in late 2001. If Edmonds is to be believed – and there seems little reason to doubt her credibility – the implications could be very serious for Japan.

A Call for Solidarity

By Maidhc Ó Cathail. Published in Kansai Time Out, March 2009.

As last year drew to a close, while Kansai dwellers were indulging in the typical debauchery of the seasonal bonenkai (forget the year gathering), the people of Gaza had little cause for celebration and even more reason to forget 2008.

Mr. Abe Goes to Brussels: Japan’s Emerging Military Humanism

“Whoever invokes humanity is trying to cheat.” Carl Schmitt’s maxim is worth repeating whenever leaders of powerful states claim humanitarian motives for their military interventions in weaker states. “Analogously, one can use the concepts of peace, justice, progress, or civilization, to claim them as one’s own and deny them to one’s enemy,” wrote Schmitt, the German political philosopher who saw straight through the humanitarian pretexts of liberal imperialists.

Japanese Aid: Who Benefits?

Japan celebrated 50 years of Official Development Assistance (ODA) in 2004. The world’s second largest donor, Japan has disbursed over $230 billion in the last five decades. So it would seem that Japan has good reason to feel proud of its generosity to less fortunate nations. But who benefits from Japanese ODA? How effective is it? And to what extent is it motivated by humanitarianism?

The Folly of Japanese Foreign Policy

Japan’s foreign policy is “totally insane,” according to one of the world’s leading peacemakers. Speaking locally last October, Johan Galtung, the Norwegian pioneer of peace and conflict research, said it is “madness” for Japan to “risk falling between the two stools” of a declining American empire and an emerging East Asian community.