GlobalTalk 21

I have been “mistaken,” “misled,” “misrepresented,” and been “unaccountably in error,”
and am sorry if you have been offended

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Re the “Keynesian” and the “Institutional, Historical and Behavioral” Perspectives

Reproduced below with two minor edits are the relevant paragraphs in a memo that I prepared for an interview earlier in the week. Essentiall...

Friday, June 29, 2012

Toru Hashimoto Not Answer to Peter Tasker’s Hopes for Radical Solution to Japan’s Economic Woes

Paul Sracic, good friend of Japan since his Tokyo sojourn as a Fulbright Lecturer, shot me this link to a Financial Times op-ed by Peter T...

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

I Think I Misunderestimated (Now) Mayor Hashimoto

The consumption tax hike and the politics around it have been dominating headlines (while the political decision to restart Units 3 and 4 at...

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Fleeting Thoughts about Ozawa’s Possible Loss of Control over His Own Fate

57 DPJ members of the House of Representatives—enough to deny the ruling coalition a majority in the lower house if they leave the DPJ en ma...

Monday, June 25, 2012

Very Brief Assessment of Noda’s Performance

This is it. “[Noda]'s done a pretty good job, all things considered. He's done two very important things: set priorities, then stic...

An Addendum of Sorts to the “Post-election” Post

The latest from the off-blog online discussions: “Ozawa's plan seems to be to get as many people lined up against the tax hike bill--th...

Sunday, June 24, 2012

It’s a Post-election Grand Coalition… or Instability/Gridlock Followed by Party Realignment

Most of the attention from the media, political analysts and other pundits has been focused on the number of lower house DPJ members that Oz...

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Memo on the Consumption Tax

Nothing says Happy New Year like talk of a (consumption) tax hike. Noda got the DPJ to go along by pushing the initial raise to 8% back six ...

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

My Thoughts around the Nine Defectors and Beyond

It was more like minutes than hours, wasn’t it? So what kind of people bolted the DPJ today over the prospective consumption tax hike to for...

Who Will Jump the DPJ Ship over a Consumption Tax Hike?

For now, only a couple of handfuls , if the Asahi is to be believed. We’ll know in a matter of hours, if not days, but in the meantime, her...

Friday, December 02, 2011

From My Email: Pop Culture, and a Discovery about AKB 48 (What Else?)

A couple of people and I got to talking about W. David Marx and Cool Japan, which got me to thinking about Japanese pop culture. The follow...

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Message Management Missing in Noda’s Honolulu Trade Initiative

I’d been telling everyone who would listen that Noda would take Japan into the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) FTA negotiations if only beca...

Friday, November 11, 2011

Rumble at the Yomiuri Giants and Most (But Definitely Not All) of the Media Goes Bananas

…It’s about time, so why not reboot here… You know that anyone who's looking for proof of Japanese media bias need only look at the Yomi...

Monday, May 16, 2011

Are Japan’s Days of Overseas Adventures Over?

The following is my email response to an inquiry from a friend in the academia, verbatim but with personal details edited out. [F]: Foreign ...

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Kruel Kan Going after TEPCO Pensioners? So Surprise Me

I’ve been getting a few inquiries on the government’s (so far) successful decision to essentially force TEPCO’s private-sector stakeholders—...

Thursday, May 05, 2011

My Take on the Asahi/Wikileaks, Mostly Focused on the Nuclear Disaster

Another stateside friend New York tossed this NYT report my way. The following is my response, lightly edited here with a sentence tacked ...

More on My Take on TEPCO’s Post-Nuclear Disaster Liability

A friend of mine wrote in to tell me that according to a media report, plans are afoot for a 50/50 split between TEPCO and the government fo...

Wednesday, May 04, 2011

The Japanese Government’s Liability around the Nuclear Disaster: or, Edano Got Game

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano has quietly but firmly made it clear that the Japanese government is jointly and severally liable (he ap...

Sunday, May 01, 2011

The Ebb and Flow of the Anti-Kan Forces

Some headlines from the online Yomiuiri: 23 April: “Diet Members Aligned with Ozawa to Step Up Efforts to ‘Depose Kan’ When New Week Begins ...

Friday, April 29, 2011

Let’s Be Nice to Our Prime Minister; It’s a National Holiday, for God’s Sake

Kaoto Kan, currently Japan’s prime minister, is not exactly my favorite politician, but surely he deserves some credit for what he is trying...

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About Me

Jun Okumura: After graduation, Jun Okumura promptly entered what is now the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and stayed in in its ecosystem most of his “adult” life. Along the way, he had pleasant stops in an assortment of Japanese quangos (Japangos?), overseas assignments and government agencies. After thirty years, though, it dawned on him that he had no aptitude whatsoever for administration and/or management. Armed with this epiphany, he went to the authorities and arranged an amicable separation; to come out, as it were. He is completely on his own IYKWIAS, but he and the METI folks remain “good friends.” He currently holds the titles of “visiting researcher” at the Meiji Institute for Global Affairs (no, that MIGA) and counselor at a risk analysis firm that dares not speak its name. This gives him plenty of time to blog or make money on his own. His bank account says that he does too much of the first, and insists that he do more of what he calls “intellectual odd jobs”. He wants to be paid to write fulltime, or better, talk—where the easy money is—but that distinction has largely escaped him. He really should not be referring to himself in the third person; he is not that famous.

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