On October 20th the Mayor of Futaba, a town barely 20 km away from the destroyed nuclear plant of Fukushima I, whose neighbors, like many others have been abandoned by the state and TEPCO, spoke at the United Nations. Video in Japanese with English subtitles (not long but very informative):
H/t Energy News.
I saw this News Story about the Futaba Mayor estimating 30 years before people of the Town can return ---> http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T130106002813.htm
ReplyDeleteJapan's Debt crisis is said to be worse than that of Greece's. They are also faced with an aging population and an economy that has been stagnant for a couple of decades.
With a right wing government ruling at the center - do you think all these factors can combine to act as fueling forces for a Violent Sino-Japanese conflict?
Maybe. Essentially China is trying to recover the time lost in the last several centuries, what implies securing access to the seas (Taiwan, South China Sea, Daiyou Islands...), while Japan is running suicidally forward in an impossible attempt to regain a primacy that is lost forever (more so after Fukushima).
DeleteBut I think that China will play it wise and "buy" Japan instead of fighting it, eroding the threat from inside instead of bumping heads beyond what makes sense. Time runs in favor of China now: they can afford to take it easy.
But while war is a possibility, peace scares me too: we are destroying our planet with our without war.
Couldn't agree more. While China does have a relative advantage of time - things arn't so good internally. Today there is news of Journalists at a major Chinese paper, Southern Weekly, going on a strike against censorship.
DeleteMaybe the Govt. would try to initiate a War to give direction to the public anger. The only saving grace seems to my eyes that China and Japan do not share a land border - or a war would have started by now.
China has indeed many internal problems but with a growth rate of 8-10% and expecting to overcome the USA in absolute GDP by 2016-21, the can buy some time. Japan instead is long overdue and the Fukushima disaster can only be the proverbial last nail on the coffin.
DeleteUnlike in the early 20th century, now Japan cannot even dream of going expansionist. Even if they waste much of their collapsing budget in rebuilding the army, they can't reach too far with China being already a global-sized superpower.
"The only saving grace seems to my eyes that China and Japan do not share a land border - or a war would have started by now".
Nah. Actually for China the access to the sea is much more important than land borders, which are mostly in the hands of "pacific giants", so to say: Russia and India or regimes so weak an autocratic that they can be easily bought with money and investments.
Of course they can also be bought by the USA but these have the wrong custom of invading them all instead in wasteful displays of pointless arrogance. And even before they withdraw, Beijing has already bought them off.