Sho Yoshida could be a relative of mine. I hope he and others stay safe, and Japan treads lightly. I love my culture..as well as all Asian culture, and living in Peace is always best. The horrors of war we have seen recently in Iraq..and Afghanistan. This increasingly small planet needs for people to live in peace, if we are to survive into the centuries to come.

Yoi ostoshi wo! Happy New Year everyone!

Last thing the world needs is another military power with imperialist dreams, especially one like Japan which has a dangerous conservative party.

a newly revived militarism in Japan! All the young protestors in the streets in this video were holding up placards with my Japanese middle name on it. You see, I was born in Tokyo Japan on the original Japanese Constitution Day, Kempo Kinenbi, in 1952, which was the very day the post- WWII US military occupation of Japan ended and the modern constitution of Japan went into effect. My middle name, "Kempo" means Constitution in Japanese. My father was a young diplomat working for the US embassy in Tokyo, who helped to write that Constitution, which specifically forbids Japan from having a full-fledged military - just Self Defense forces. Many Japanese friends of my father thought that he had given me the middle name of Kempo specifically because he admired the ideals of pacifism enshrined in the modern Japanese constitution.

But alas, if people in high places, no matter what the nation or its form of government, start moving to the beat of a different drummer - specifically one who sounds the drumbeats of war, then they can subvert any constitution, no matter how originally pacifist it may have been, to their ends. You might say that a country's constitution is nothing more than an inanimate piece of paper, but it's the people using it who give it life; in other words, a constitution is no better than the people in the government who use it, and the purpose they use it for.

I think that the whole Fukushima tsunami and nuclear disaster had a lot to do with the reawakening of Japanese militarism. You might say it was a kind of national traumatic experience that has had a similar effect on Japan as the 9/11 attacks that got Americans stirred up for the war on terror, and led to the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, etc... Instead of doing some serious soul searching and coming to the conclusion that nuclear power isn't right or safe, a new kind of nucleo-militarism has arisen, in which the state has allied itself with the powerful nuclear power industry - a kind of use of the shock doctrine, if you will.